Link-building is an effective way of giving your website a shot at ranking higher in search engines.
The process of gaining backlinks from other websites to your own is known as link building. Link building is a search engine optimization methodology that boosts your search engine rankings.
Search engine algorithms determine the relevance of a page through links. A high digit of links to a website indicates that the content is valuable.
During the start of website ranking, links did not have to be of excellent quality, authoritative, or significant to your niche in order to be effective. Since then, search engines have changed and started ranking websites according to quality, authority, and relevance.
Scholarship Link-building
Scholarship link-building is a type of link-building strategy. Scholarship link building is the process of promoting a scholarship or financial help fund on your website and stimulating educational institutions with ‘.edu’ domains to link to it from their scholarship sites.
For instance, if your website is about medical doctors, you can create a scholarship page that proposes to pay a percentage of a student’s doctoral degree.
Once your scholarship page is set up, you can reach out to different educational institutions with.edu domains and request that they link to your scholarship page on their website.
Essentially, colleges want to connect their students with tuition funding. Scholarship link-building became popular back in the day because sites could use a single scholarship landing page to obtain many backlinks; hence, they earn more backlinks with little effort.
This tactic was adversely affected over time because almost everybody wanted quick and easy link placement. Scholarship link-building has resulted in a plethora of low-quality links from.edu sites.
Reasons Why Scholarship Link-building Is Not As Effective
A. Backlinks promote an exchange of money.
Basically, this type of link-building strategy is an obvious pay-to-play link-building technique that encourages the monetary exchange for a backlink. In this case, the link is not a signal of trust in your site. Instead, the school is simply going to link to your scholarship because you are providing students with financial support.
B. Most scholarship link-building does not necessarily focus on relevance.
As mentioned above, the page ranking by Google is now determined by quality and relevance. This insignificant link topic creates a link’s loss in value or adversely affects ranking.
Scholarship resource pages must link directly to the scholarship landing page of a website.
It would be best if you acquired links to related topics from.edu sites. Like the example mentioned above, if your company is about medicine, you have to offer a scholarship to medical students.
C. The misconception about .edu domains affects your backlinks.
Because of this misconception, many people focus on building links to.edu sites. If you place too much emphasis on these links, your site may appear repetitive. So, it would be best if you don’t continue operating under this misunderstanding.
D. Authority does not guarantee a high ranking.
Just because you obtain a link from a reputable .edu domain does not guarantee that your rankings will improve.
In general, sites with more authority are more trustworthy and of higher quality, but still, relevance is what matters for rankings. Backlinks are meaningless if you build links from authoritative sites that have nothing to do with the context of your site.
Why Should You Continue Doing Scholarship Link-building?
Despite all the arguments regarding the possible reasons behind the ineffectiveness of scholarship link-building, why should you keep doing it?
A. Goodwill
Again and again, scholarship link building is the process of promoting a scholarship or financial help fund on your website and stimulating educational institutions with ‘.edu’ domains to link to it from their scholarship sites.
If you are sincerely offering financial support to students, then you are making goodwill, and it will not necessarily harm your site.
B. Online Visibility
Customers and clients can easily find and contact you when you are visible online. The strength of your online brand visibility is especially necessary if you are attempting to attract new customers and expand your business.
Your online presence can help your brand gain trust and credibility. One way to demonstrate the legitimacy of your company is through online visibility. Customers will put their trust in you and do business with you if they see that you have an active website and social media accounts where they can read reviews and learn about your products and services.
Scholarship link-building, despite the cons, produces more content. In return, it helps you stay visible online.
Conclusion
Scholarship link-building is not necessarily ineffective. They can still benefit your brand in certain ways. Simply put, the scholarship strategy is no longer regarded as a reliable source. It is prudent to approach this topic with caution, but do not dismiss it entirely.
Don’t waste time on tactics that aren’t long-term. Instead, divert your energy to tactics that are proven effective. Being in the business field, you have to invest your time and resources in tactics that will potentially improve your overall business.
It is always crucial to track your strategies to see which are effective and which are not.