Working as a professional SEO, or search engine optimization, consultant for over 5 years I have come to appreciate the importance of having high trust, or authority, backlinks. A diverse backlinking campaign should always have as many of these high authority links as possible, and what better source than EDU domains.
However, finding EDU sites where you are able to post or submit your link can be a serious chore. After a lot of hands on experience, as well as trial and error, I have learned some of the best footprints that you can use with advanced search queries to find sites on EDU domains. These searches will allow you to pull up a ton of authority sites to place your backlink as they both find platforms that allow link posting and also make certain they are on EDU sites only. Best of all you can get started pulling up sites right now and avoid those hours upon hours of discovering which search queries will allow you to find sites running the platforms you are looking for. Stop spending hours to wind up with a handful of blog comments that may never get approved and use the same searches that I use.
Basic Advanced Search Queries
For this task you are going to need to use the Google search engine as these advanced search strings are essentially parameters for Google search. These are the basic queries you will use to narrow down the type of site and should be used in all of your footprint searches.
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Site:.edu – The ‘Site:‘ search parameter will specify that you want results returned only from domains of this prefix. So if you use ‘Site:.edu’ you will return only EDU domains, you may also use ‘Site:.gov‘ for government sites or if you are UK based ‘Site:.ac.uk‘ which is there .EDU equivalent.
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Inurl: – The ‘Inurl:‘ parameter will return only results that contain what follows in their URL, this is handy for platforms that use a certain URL structure on all sites running them.
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” “ – A word or set of words inside of quotation marks is also extremely beneficial to narrowing down results. It will return only results with those exact words in that exact order found on the page.
EDU Backlink Footprints
Now that you understand why we are using certain search parameters here are some of the most popular platforms that allow posting. Just copy and paste these footprints into Google to get started, or take what you learned from above to modify them for additional results.
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“powered by mediawiki” Inurl:index.php? Site:.edu – This search query is the footprint for MediaWiki sites, which allow full article and link posting, on EDU domains with signup.
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“unauthenticated user” wiki Inurl:”/groups/” Site:.edu – A query of this search string will yield results for Mac OSX Wiki sites which also allow full article and backlink posting and do not require signup.
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“powered by wordpress” -“you must be logged in” Site:.edu – This will yield WordPress blogs where signup or logging in is not required for posting comments.
While these are certainly some of the most popular platforms to use they are hardly the only ones. Take what you have learned here and create your own searches, using platform footprints, to find more of these powerful sites to create backlinks on.
