IS schilorship links safe?

scholarship will give your site a hit but it's a risky process these days. Few days back 10beats got penalized because of adding scholarship. I would not like t test the risky process anymore
 
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MatthewGraham said:
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.


Would love to see the results. Some tangible data would be nice, since I see these claims all the time without any real data:
  1. Scholarship backlinks with high OBL can result in penalties or otherwise hurt a site's rankings
  2. Scholarship links cause algorithmic penalties
  3. Scholarship links are now risky, bad, and/or don't work
  4. 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:
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.



Source?





Did some searching and found the source/context for where the site owner stated that scholarship links hurt 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 BHW thread about the 10Beasts scholarship campaign also turned up in search results.

View attachment 99844
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 search for the 10beasts domain shows the site's scholarship page as the fourth result, which would suggest that it's doing fine again, and isn't been harmed algorithmically.


Could be a lot of things. Would be interested in hearing more details.




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.



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:

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.



These seems to be the sources you're referring to, for everyone else's reference:
Click to expand...
I always find your post very interesting but honestly I don't understand this one where you quote me, you took a part out of context, as I said scholarships can be safe or not exactly like a guest post, they are many ways to do, you ask a source from the part you quote "be linked on a page from a no niched site with hundreds of outbound link is not a good choice."

I base my knowledge on what I hear from the biggest SEO authority and also on my own experience, if you wanted a link from a scientist proven source like in the health industry I do not have any.

SEO is an art, not a science, every source is a kind of speculation (since google keep the algorithm secret) even if most of the ranking factors are very obvious to understand and test, that said I will be happy to learn something, if you have a source about how great and safe are high OBL not niched link.

-------------------

@Jamez Michael Here a good post from MOZ - 2015 https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-create-and-run-an-effective-scholarship-outreach-campaign
EDIT: The previous message, a guy asking about was deleted :rolleyes:
 
Last edited:
it depends on the niche may be - still if you wanna try you can and if the niche is less competitive your site will be damn sure no 1..... i have proofs of few sites which are rocking and the guy started ranking in less than a week and now i wanted to try :(
 
In my expedience am doing this to my clients more than 3 years , most of them come for repeat while i check their website its got some improvement.Again am saying if you doing in spammy way this will wont work for you.Also if you only do this kind of links then that not get good benefit for you.You have to mixed up as well.

All am saying scholarship links will help for sure.But there is no proof this links affect your sites.
 
Could be a lot of things. Would be interested in hearing more details.
Click to expand...
I disavowed them as part of a general cleanup. Also put some spammy blog comments etc in the disavow file... So too many variables. But your reasoning makes sense to me, that google would only at the most devalue not penalize, because of legit uses for the directory.
Kinda regret disavowing some potentially pretty good links, but got positive movement, and better safe than sorry I guess
 
MatthewGraham said:
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.


Would love to see the results. Some tangible data would be nice, since I see these claims all the time without any real data:
  1. Scholarship backlinks with high OBL can result in penalties or otherwise hurt a site's rankings
  2. Scholarship links cause algorithmic penalties
  3. Scholarship links are now risky, bad, and/or don't work
  4. 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:
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.



Source?





Did some searching and found the source/context for where the site owner stated that scholarship links hurt 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 BHW thread about the 10Beasts scholarship campaign also turned up in search results.

View attachment 99844
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 search for the 10beasts domain shows the site's scholarship page as the fourth result, which would suggest that it's doing fine again, and isn't been harmed algorithmically.


Could be a lot of things. Would be interested in hearing more details.




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.



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:

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.



These seems to be the sources you're referring to, for everyone else's reference:
Click to expand...

Wow sir you just nailed it.. Thanks for taking your time out and providing such a detailed suggestions.
 
virtualbyron said:
I always find your post very interesting but honestly I don't understand this one where you quote me, you took a part out of context, as I said scholarships can be safe or not exactly like a guest post, they are many ways to do, you ask a source from the part you quote "be linked on a page from a no niched site with hundreds of outbound link is not a good choice."
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification. I agree with you that they can be safe when done right and there can be risks if done wrong. Hope that clears that up.

virtualbyron said:
I base my knowledge on what I hear from the biggest SEO authority and also on my own experience as well, if you wanted a link from a scientist proven source like in the health industry I do not have any.

SEO in a art, not a science, every source is a kind of speculation (since google keep the algorithm secret) even if most of the ranking factors are very obvious to understand and test, that said I will be happy to learn something, if you have a source about how great and safe are high OBL not niched link.
Click to expand...

Agreed that there's a lot of speculation in SEO. Have been looking for a good case study about OBL. Was wondering if any of you had one, but if not will keep looking. I haven't run into any major risk from having high OBL when it makes sense to do so, like in a directory.
 
I have also used certain scholarship programs and they are really helpful and safe to use. You can also get benefited from these if you do everything in a right way.
 
Iknowsomethings said:
As always some common sense is usually really helpful. If you get link from Cambridge for your roofing website in Houston TX .. well, don't be too surprised if get penalized.
Click to expand...

That link should be fine if done right.

Jameson and Sons' $1,000 Scholarship | Helping Hard-Working American Youth Learn Trades

"Something something we think it's so good for young people to know the value of a hard days work something something go off to pursue an education something support our hard working youth."

Link can certainly be natural. Local businesses offer scholarships all the time.
 
Yeah not very good example from my side, the point was just to make sure your links looks natural and make sense to have them.
 
They can prob work if not overused and mixed up with other types of links (only small portion of whole backlink profile). But there's much more risk involved than before.
 
I received a unnatural link penalty a few weeks ago :/
 
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