By Joe Whyte

One of the most interesting link development techniques unveiled itself to me today. Many link developers and SEOs might be a little upset at me that such a great technique is not being used privately for my own gain but in my mind I fell I should share this with the SEO community as I really doubt  anyone else knows about this.

If you didn’t know, .edu backlinks are pretty darn coveted due to the high trust rank they have within Google. Most edu sites have quality inbound links, have been online for years and years and are a credible source of information to the search engines and to the community. At SEOmoz rand has a page strength tool that measures .edu links as well and assigns a particular value to how many you have coming into your site. It is safe to say that a .edu is a power link and can do a lot for your site within the search engines.

This is why services like text link brokers actually sell text link ads on .edus and you might have heard of .edu link campaigns where link developers acquire links on .edu’s by way of a presales page or purchasing a student page and placing a link on it. These methods are old, out dated, time consuming and unrealiable as a site can be reported for selling links or a student can remove your link at anytime.

Are you ready for the secret?…. Not yet!! Let me show you some interesting information. I want to show you the the power behind a .edu link. The following image is of a Google search of a drug called cialis. These internet marketers have used a .edu link to rank on the top page of Google for a very competitive drug. Although this type of technique is not one that I suggest (its a bit spammy) this example does show the shear power behind a .edu link.

Now that you know the power behind obtaining a .edu link and how coveted these links are I am going to show you somethign that took me about 5 minutes to do. I recently did a post on Joe Whyte that was asking for bloggers for a new project. I was doing some thinking and I started thinking about job postings like corporations do on monster and simplyhired etc. Then it came to me, what if I posted a job application for college students on there .edu? What would happen, is it possible and would it be SEO friendly? Well, to my suprise, it is!! Below is an image of a .edu that allowed me to post my blogging position I currently have available on their job system