Scholarships for link building still work?

[Scott ClientClicks]

I have a lawyer client who is interested in offering a scholarship. His main goal was not SEO link building, but of course that would be a nice side benefit. When I last heard about scholarship link building, it sounded like it was getting harder to get quality edu links.

Are people still using this tactic successfully for link building? If so, any recommendations for how to approach this?

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Hey Scott, I think if you go the scholarship route, I'd suggest looking at getting your scholarship info listed on fastweb.com which is a very high authority site and kinda sort of, an aggregator for scholarship opportunities. Your client would get lots of exposure there. Also, you might want to try something similar, using zipsprout.com that may possibly deliver much better link building opportunities but also satisfy your client's philanthropy.

 

[celina]

Hey Scott,

I think scholarship strategies are still a great way to build strong .edu backlinks however I believe they need to be done right vs done for backlinks. Most of these organizations have caught on to these kinda tactics and so has Google so it's important you run a true scholarship program that shows your commitment to the community, education and youth development, the bonus is the backlinks Check out some things I like to think about when doing a Scholarship strategy.
1. It's not for every industry.
2. Scholarship award should start at the minimum of $1000-$1500 for the year however the higher the monetary reward the better your scholarship will be placed.
3. Scholarship pages should stay active even when the scholarship has ended and the page should announce and highlight past winners.
4. Scholarships should be relevant to the industry. For example, it makes sense for a Lawyer to offer scholarships to law students.
I have heard Zipsprout is also a great option and helpful!
I personally find manual outreach to work out better as we are more specific on who we outreach to and not. I have heard Google giving penalties to companies who have done this tactic strictly to obtain backlinks and this was due to them using scholarship aggregators and being placed on toxic domains

I hope this helps!

 

[GeekMade]

I have a lawyer client who is interested in offering a scholarship. His main goal was not SEO link building, but of course that would be a nice side benefit. When I last heard about scholarship link building, it sounded like it was getting harder to get quality edu links.

Are people still using this tactic successfully for link building? If so, any recommendations for how to approach this?

it's actually true that backlinks are getting harder to get, nowadays people prefer to spam the web without looking at the quality of the backlinks.

You need to have a mixed backlink portfolio with natural links, authority links, web 2.0... if all of them are .edu or scholarship when someone from google take a manual action on your account they will notice that you are actually doing blacl hat... It needs to be natural and organic, white hat or gray hat! Buying backlinks is penalized by google, but you can find services like ananchor.com where they do the job for you, they will build your back link portfolio in a natural way, but you have to use it under your own risk!

I'd recommend you to stay away from building thousand of backlinks, keep it simple and natural! GOogle will love it