Very good Aaron, edu lins are easy to get which granted I won't get them for every one, but I have a ton of friends I know thats in college, and my girlfriend.

They offer free websites, and sometimes they don't run it off a sub domain, so it will be like www.iu.edu/aaronwall/

therefore all your files will go there, and the link juice will be coming from the main site.

Another way of getting free edu links is to e-mail the college, get close with the people in the it department, and then tell them your interested in a website through them it works :).

Better yet thats a great way of doing it too, and another thing is to do is e-mail the college and ask them if they have a job opening section on there website, so it don't take hours.

I e-mailed a quite of few college for website space, bingo!

Aaron the only bad thing about that man is that its only posted for 4 weeks. I just did a job opening for article writer, php programmers, or graphics designer which I'm in need of.

You could always take advantage of a PHP bug and publish your links on .edu sites remotely:-

David Naylor blog entry on free backlinks

like Tyler said, per their site:

"Your job will automatically be removed after four weeks"

tough to get trust rank from a link live only 4 weeks..

-domainersgazette.com

Those student Web pages usually have a tilde (~) in them. So it might be something like example.edu/~bsmith.

The tilde means a personal user account on Unix. If it is indexed it still counts as a link, but the tilde says "I am a personal Web page".

blogs.adison.edu

As I think some of the previous conments have implied, if you do get one of these .edu links, so what?

Many people seem to think this is some sort of magic trust rank or pagerank accrual for the recipient. It isn't. It's just another link with whatever PR the page has and whatever potential it has for traffic.

The web largely started at .edu domains, thus the core clean trusted link sources on the web...many of those are .edu sites, and many of them have a disproportionately large amount of PageRank and TrustRank (or whatever other equivalents one wants to measure link authority and trust through).

Hi Jeff
People value what they think is of value...meaning that SEO techniques continue long after they are no longer effective. As long as Google thinks a part of the web graph has a higher signal to noise ratio they will trust it more.

I've seen this where a business pays college students $10 to put a link to their Web site on their .edu personal page. I can't believe that search engines give this as much rank as they do because there is no relevancy there and isn't it basically buying high quality link spam? If this is acceptable at this time don't you think it isn't a good strategy because the relevancy will eventually be determined to be worthless and sites that rely on it as a strategy will be dropped in results?

For a few years, I used to get asked to visit my old college and give guest lectures to the design students (scare them a little with dead-line horror stories.)

I'm currently looking to get back in with them, plus, I'd like to get some PR into the deal: "Old boy done gud, shares experiences" Or something similar, with some full-fat anchor text to my 'blog and a relevant story.

As you can see, my expectations are quite modest...

.edu Links are of value. Look at www.digits.com at their backlinks. 5 of the first 10 are from edu websites and there is no way you can say that .edu links hold no value. They do.

The hardest part is getting the right link. ~ it is mentioned above about the tilde. The chance of a link on one of these spaces making a difference is almost very slim to none. It is 99% a waste of time and money.

I found a .edu the other day with a forum, blogs for $25 a month, a link directory and sponsorships where you can be the only link on a page. It was at http://www.adison.edu

So far I got a blog and was able to do 25 posts in the forum with my links and after a month I have 50+ .edu links and the site is already a pr6...