Free .edu and .gov backlinks

This is the a post in The Link Building series, showing you how and where to find the best places to add links to your websites to increase website traffic.

In every webmaster forum and blog out there, the community always goes nuts over finding ways to get universities and government sites to link to you. This post is dedicated to helping those people save their money and allow them to get an unlimited amount of .edu and .gov links for free, all through the power of google!

The ’site:’ feature in Google allows only results with that domain name or domain extension to show up. You can “hack” this feature to allow Google to find the most relevant university and government websites related to your sites.

Examples:
Google query: site:.gov blog [or site:.edu blog]
Results in: Google finds any .gov website that is running a blog or has a /blog/ directory. You can then visit these blogs and post comments (if you can find wordpress blogs like this one), and get hundreds of free .gov backlinks.
[Alternative queries: ‘blog’ ‘blogs’ ‘wordpress’ ‘comment’ ‘guestbook’ ‘2007′ ‘2006′]

Google query: site:.edu *your niche* + blog
For example: site:.edu internet marketing blog
The top result is a .edu blog that links to a non edu blog, but that blog is related and is PR3 and has edu backlinks. That is also a great relevant place to comment, even if it is not directly a .edu. On the other hand, the third result was a PR3 highly related .edu internet marketing blog with zero comments. That is easy .edu backlinks!

You can easily replicate these queries to fit your needs, and it is highly scalable. You can find .edu, .gov, and if you are lucky, .mil blogs. If you are not as picky, you can just search specifically for the blogs without the .edu or .gov extension, and you can find some high pageranked blogs on the first pages of results. Play around with it, enjoy it, it’s free!