Who has control over a .edu website?
The University’s faculty and staff.

Who makes changes to their website?
Nine times out of ten it’s the University’s staff however sometimes a student will be put in charge of making updates to a web page or series of web pages as part of the curriculum of a course. But even if that’s the case, those individuals are being monitored by the professor so even if you do get a link don’t count on it for long. And in a Google world where the age of a link is important that temporary benefit is just a drop in the bucket.

Where are the most valuable pages on a .edu website?
Sure the home page of the .edu might be the holy grail of link juice but consider this: the chances of the content of the home page being related to your subject is slim and the link placement is almost guaranteed to be in a sidebar or footer. Not ideal. No, the inner pages of a .edu site maybe 2 or 3 directories removed from the home page are the most likely to attract a link and that link is more likely to be both related to your content and going to be placed within the content section of the web page. This is where your maximum benefit will come from.

Where do .edu link acquisition firms place your link?
Do you think they’re making sizable donations to the University or paying the staff? Of course not, so what are the chances that you will get a quality link like in the scenario I just gave you? Nil. They pay poor college students for links on their personal pages which most often are disconnected from the University’s site. Rarely can you reach it via a link from the University website so zero link juice is being passed. Remember, just because it’s on the website does not mean it’s passing link juice from the domain. We could get into an argument about it passing TrustRank from the domain itself but that’s another argument for a much more in-depth analysis. Even still, recall that the student is poor. Getting $10/month from a link sounds great but getting $1000/month from 100 links sounds better. Divide the TrustRank among 100 links and the fact that the page is resembling a menagerie of unrelated websites how much trust do you think you will actually get?

Okay, whew. So we now know where we want to get our links, who controls those web pages, and who can’t get the link for you. So why is it that 3/4ths of the people I talk with still try to market their content for students? Don’t market for the student market for the staff!

The recipe is a simple one: create quality related content that the faculty will benefit from and will want to pass on as a resource. Then market it to the staff member in charge of that page.