Scholarships and link from .edu

[Larry Linson]

I have a lawyer client in a very competitive local market who is considering offering a scholarship to law students. Obviously she is motivated by altruism but she is also interested in what effect the scholarship and links from any law school .edu pages would have on her ranking in her cut throat market. She has no direct competitors doing this now and generally is low first page in Google SERP on her important keywords. I have looked at scholarship-offering lawyers in others areas under ahrefs and indeed find these links seems the DR and UR is quite high for these links. Any ideas?

 

[Dan Foland]

Google is very aware of this tactic. And IMO this tactic doesn't work as well as it used to. Google should also be able to easily ignore this type of link building.

That being said, I've seen firsthand that it can help, particularly in competitive niches with everything else being relatively equal.

Though, a strong word of caution... If you can't dedicate the time and effort YoY into it it may not be worth it. Losing those links seems to harm sites more than the links originally helped them.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I have a lawyer client in a very competitive local market who is considering offering a scholarship to law students. Obviously she is motivated by altruism but she is also interested in what effect the scholarship and links from any law school .edu pages would have on her ranking in her cut throat market. She has no direct competitors doing this now and generally is low first page in Google SERP on her important keywords. I have looked at scholarship-offering lawyers in others areas under ahrefs and indeed find these links seems the DR and UR is quite high for these links. Any ideas?

Definitely use to work, hard to tell anymore.

Also, Google did come out and say .edu links aren't as valuable as everyone thinks they are. But still, links from legal .edu's? They could still be very powerful. You'd need to keep the scholarship up every year I would think. Also the links won't go to the homepage, they'll go to your scholarship page. And as mentioned above, Google could easily stop this if they wanted and may have.

I'd try it at least and see what happens.

 

[CallumS]

Seems silly, but is the scholarship being offered altruistically (as suggested), or for the purpose for getting the links...

Google has said that .edu links are not as valuable as people think they are, and for a number of years now Google has been ignoring links from Scholarship Link Schemes. So if you are ploughing a couple of grand each year at a scholarship just to get a link - then you might be wasting your money!

That being said, here is a though (and this is really just a hypothetical theory):

Google wants to surface legitimate, trusted results for queries. So for the query "Law school Scholarship in ***", if you can demonstrate that your scholarship is legitimate and trustworthy then your scholarship page might be worth ranking for that kind of query . In that case, I don't see why links to that page from relevant resources (like local universities) would help any less than say, a local blogger, legitimately mentioning/recommending you.

Then again, how to demonstrate/how Google can tell your scholarship is legit or not is another question entirely - as is how much conversion benefit you would actually get from this - I guess bigger picture you may improve your brands image, or attract better talent from graduating classes etc. etc..

Food for thought

 

[Rich Owings]

Scholarship links usually go to an internal page, so they don't help much with map pack rankings, service pages, etc.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Scholarship links usually go to an internal page, so they don't help much with map pack rankings, service pages, etc.

I personally believe any backlinks to any page on your site will help with this. But that's just conjecture on my part.

 

[Rich Owings]

Oh, I think they will help some, but nowhere near as much as links to your GMB landing page.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Oh, I think they will help some, but nowhere near as much as links to your GMB landing page.

I agree. Typically with scholarship links you're looking at 15-20 high level .edu links though. I would imagine it helps quite a bit, unless this specific tactic has been killed by Google.

 

[katandmouse]

Jump ahead nearly 2 years and we have this: Does Scholarship Link Building Still Work in 2020?

Every PI attorney I've researched on the 1st page has a scholarship. It clearly is not getting them penalized, but correlation is not causation.

The same attorneys have hundreds or thousands of PBN, guest blog and paid backlinks.

I'd love to know if anyone has ranked a PI attorney on the 1st page in a very competitive area without any kind artificially inseminated link building, including scholarship links.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Very timely. Did some research today on some competitors and found one attorney doing this. Is he ranking well because of it or in spite of it? Would be hard to tell. The others I checked weren't using the tactic though.