Currently, I am using scholarship links on two websites and they're both ranking well.
- Site #1 -- 70+ pages; 1+ year old; TF 22, CF 18
- Site #2 -- 900+ pages; 4+ years old; TF 13, CF 28
No signs of an algorithmic penalty on either; definitely free of manual penalties.
Searching site:domain.com for both of these domains brings up the scholarship pages as one of the top pages on both sites, which implies that Google thinks highly of these pages.
I am definitely going to try some scholarship links on a test site to see the results.
Would love to see the results. Some tangible data would be nice, since I see these claims all the time without any real data:
- Scholarship backlinks with high OBL can result in penalties or otherwise hurt a site's rankings
- Scholarship links cause algorithmic penalties
- Scholarship links are now risky, bad, and/or don't work
- Scholarship links can cause manual penalties
#1 and #2 are completely illogical. There are, in fact, scholarships offered by real people and organizations who care about more than the SEO value. And these scholarships are listed in the same directories. It's quite unlikely that Google wants to penalize these real, legitimate scholarships.
Additionally, directories have real uses besides link building. These scholarship pages weren't made to be link building schemes;
they were made to provide students with a way to navigate to external pages with scholarship information... it turns out that links are a convenient way to direct users to external pages. Who would have thought! And since there are many relevant external pages, for convenience they happened to include all of those links on the same page! You know... like a fucking directory! For example, this directory has over 100 OBL:
- https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/websites/welcome.html
And is a completely legitimate directory. It would be basically impossible for Google to target sites simply for having backlinks from high OBL pages, considering the fact that directories are used by real websites for real/non-SEO purposes.
#3 is questionable -- as
@W9go stated,
"they are maybe devaluated." It's plausible that their value might be less now than before. But, they certainly work, at least to some extent, when done correctly. There might be manual penalties if done very poorly, but the risk of that is overall low, provided that your site is otherwise clean.
#4 is plausible -- linked to a case study below that implies this may have happened to a site called 10Beast (although there are many confounding variables in that case study). Again, this depends on link quality. Clean scholarship links back to a site that is generally clean are quite unlikely to result in a manual penalty.
they are only safe on page where there are not many outgoing links
yes be linked on a page from a no niched site with hundreds of outbound link is not a good choice.
Source?
I heard that 10beasts gets hit by google in Dec 2017 due to scholarship links. the previous owner of that website did confirm that himeself.
Scholarship links got hit already!!
Not as safe as they once were. Sites using scholarship links are getting hit pretty often.
Did some searching and https://diggitymarketing.com/interview-with-luqman-khan-of-10beasts/. In the interview, the (former) site owner also states that:
A manual penalty was given to 10Beasts, not an algorithmic penalty:
Article: [10Beasts] got penalized with an unnatural links manual action in Google Search Console.
[...]
Luqman.: I think it was fast because I knew that what is the thing which is the main reason to penalize the website because a manual penalization is really helpful that you know that it is the link and that’s the natural links’ utilization so you know what you have to do really. So it wasn’t that difficult to figure out what to do.
Manual penalties are completely different from algorithmic penalties. The former site owner stated that the site was ranking great from the scholarship links until getting a manual penalty. Which suggests that scholarship links still work unless you do something dumb and get a manual penalty. It's pretty fucking hard to get a manual penalty unless you're doing something dumb.
The penalty occurred shortly after a new webmaster took over the website:
Matt..: How long after the sale was the penalty?
Luqman: I think the website was hand over to the buyer on 8th of December and it was penalized on 25th or December.
Matt..: Merry Christmas, yeah.
17 days is more than enough time for a new webmaster to do something dumb and to get a manual penalty for it. While it could very well have been related to something the former webmaster did, the fact that it was in the hands of a completely different person makes the claim that scholarship links had anything to do with it questionable.
There were also web 2.0s (and other non-scholarship links) being used to rank the website:
Matt..: So in your opinion, what was the link type that was causing the most trouble for the site?
Luqman: There were a few web 2.0s. They were scholarship links mainly. That’s pretty much all, yeah.
The rest of the interview states that the web 2.0s (and some other backlinks) were bought from the BHW marketplace. Backlinks from the BHW marketplace are frequently spammy. Even links with good metrics are often on pages with spun content and so on. Spun content and garbage content/layout/style can certainly lead to manual penalties. Many confounding variables here.
The site owner also seems to have been fairly blatant and public about using scholarship links, which suggests that it's plausible that Google manually audited the site to put a head on a pike, so to speak, to discourage others from building scholarship links. Considering that BHW posters are constantly stating that scholarship links don't work anymore, it would seem that this kind of scare tactic worked, if that was Google's intention.
If you're interested in reading posts by people arguing about the 10Beasts case study, this https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/stop-building-scholarship-links-10beasts-case-study.997567/ about the 10Beasts scholarship campaign also turned up in search results.
A Reddit thread about 10Beasts' scholarship campaign also came up, but I got cancer almost immediately from venturing onto Reddit's SEO subforum, so I'm not putting that link here. I mean, Jesus, I thought that there were some dumb questions on BHW -- don't make eye contact with people who post on Reddit's SEO forums.
A https://www.google.com/search?ei=WJFlWoamKcucjwOigpGICQ&q=site%3A10beasts.com shows the https://10beasts.com/scholarship/ as the fourth result, which would suggest that it's doing fine again, and isn't been harmed algorithmically.
I disavowed my scholarship links on one my sites, and removed scholarship page. Rankings have improved almost immediately, can't be sure that's the cause tho
Could be a lot of things. Would be interested in hearing more details.
I've seen 3 sites being hit in the same week because of scholarship links.
Not in one of my niches it didn't. The guy still ranks up top with mostly scholarship links.
Can you show me a website that got hit by this, I just want to see there link profile.
Would also like to see any or all of the examples mentioned here. As far as I can tell, the sites that are getting hit for this are using sloppy and/or risky SEO elsewhere.
If I point only couple of links will you consider it safe? Is there any other opportunity instead of scholarship that i can offer so universities link back. Any ideas ?
There is thing called play safe when its about SEO, few links not going to hurt you OP.
It's probably more important to consider how the scholarship links fit into your link-building campaigns overall, rather than worrying about how many scholarships you have. If your website popped up yesterday and has no backlinks, it's probably going to be riskier to build scholarship backlinks than it would be for an older site that already has other authoritative backlinks.
Also, agreed with
@virtualbyron in this regard -- some scholarship links are better than others.
As for other methods, scholarship links really are one of the best ways to get backlinks from universities. They still work, at least when done correctly.
On a related note, donor links are a similar method that is worth looking into:
- https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablackhatworld.com+donor+links
As always in SEO there are different ways to do, scholarship links can be safe, like guest post or any other link type no scalable by automation
Definitely true that there are huge differences between links, even if they are of the same type. A $1 "guest post" on a PBN from the marketplace is going to be worse than a $xxx guest post on a real, high-quality website.
But also some people are saying they’re still ok -
@randomblackguy is in favour of them still.
These seems to be the sources you're referring to, for everyone else's reference:
- https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/proof-that-scholarship-links-are-still-working.1002579/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8zYiE98TeA
