How Scholarship Link Building Works and Whether It's Worth It

Scholarship link building is a tactic where a business creates a real student scholarship, then contacts university financial aid offices to get the scholarship listed on their .edu pages – earning a backlink in the process. The appeal is straightforward: .edu domains carry high authority, the links are technically earned rather than bought, and a single campaign can generate dozens of referring domains. Whether that appeal translates into meaningful SEO value in 2026 is a more complicated question.

How the Tactic Works

The mechanics are simple. A business sets up a scholarship page on its website, typically offering $500 to $2,000 to a student who meets a set of eligibility criteria. The business then finds colleges and universities with external scholarship listing pages and emails their financial aid offices to request inclusion. When the school adds the listing, the business receives a backlink from a .edu domain.

Universities maintain these pages as a service to students. They link to outside scholarships because doing so costs them nothing and benefits their student body. That alignment is what made this tactic viable in the first place.

Local link building strategies follow a similar logic: identify the pages that want to link to you, give them a reason to, and make the process easy. Scholarship campaigns apply that principle at scale.

Step 1: Create a Legitimate Scholarship Page

Before any outreach, you need a scholarship page that universities will accept. Financial aid offices have seen hundreds of these requests. A page that reads like an SEO play will be ignored or rejected.

A credible scholarship page includes:

1. The scholarship name – use a descriptive name tied to your field or mission, not a keyword-stuffed phrase like "Blue T-Shirt Scholarship"
2. Eligibility criteria – year of study, GPA requirement, field of study, citizenship
3. Award amount – be specific; a real dollar figure builds credibility
4. Application instructions – how students apply, what they submit, who reviews applications
5. Deadline – a firm date signals the scholarship is genuine
6. Contact information – a real email address at your domain

Keep the page simple and factual. There is no need for heavy design or marketing language. Financial aid offices are looking for information they can pass on to students, not a sales pitch.

Step 2: Build a Prospect List of .edu Scholarship Pages

Not all university pages are targets. General scholarship pages on major universities typically link only to accredited programs or search portals. The pages you want are external scholarship listing pages, where schools compile outside awards available to their students.

Use these Google search operators to find them:

• site:.edu "external scholarships"
• site:.edu "outside scholarships"
• site:.edu inurl:scholarships "apply"
• site:.edu "financial aid" "external" "scholarship opportunities"

Work through the results and add qualifying pages to a spreadsheet. For each entry, record the school name, the URL of the scholarship listing page, and the contact email. Most pages list a financial aid office email such as finaid@school.edu or scholarships@school.edu. That is sufficient. You do not need a named contact to get a response, though finding a decision-maker's email through a tool like Hunter.io can improve conversion rates.

A realistic prospect list for a first campaign is 150 to 300 schools.

Step 3: Write and Send Your Outreach Email

The outreach email does not need to be elaborate. Financial aid offices are not evaluating your prose. They are deciding whether the scholarship is real and whether their students would benefit from knowing about it.

A functional template:

Subject: Scholarship Opportunity for [School Name] Students

>

My name is [Name] and I work with [Company], a [brief description of what your company does].

>

We are offering a [Award Amount] scholarship to [School Name] students. Eligible applicants must [eligibility criteria]. The deadline to apply is [Date].

>

We would be grateful if you would consider listing this opportunity on your external scholarships page: [URL of their listing page].

>

More information is available at: [URL of your scholarship page].

>

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Change only the school name, the scholarship page link reference, and their listing page URL for each prospect. In a 2018 case study documented by Mangools, a practitioner sent 200 emails using a similarly generic template and received 12 backlinks – a 6% conversion rate from emails sent to general financial aid addresses. The same study found that 95% of backlinks from scholarship campaigns were do-follow.

Send in batches. Avoid blasting 200 emails in a single day from a cold domain.

Step 4: Follow up Once

Many emails get lost, deprioritised, or buried in financial aid inboxes that handle thousands of student queries. A single follow-up after three to five business days recovers a meaningful share of responses.

Keep the follow-up short:

Following up to see if you had a chance to review our scholarship opportunity for [School Name] students. Happy to answer any questions.

Do not follow up more than once per prospect. Repeated contact with the same office will not improve conversion rates and may result in your domain being flagged.

Step 5: Verify the Links and Track Results

Once schools begin responding and listing the scholarship, verify each link manually or with a backlink tool such as Ahrefs or SEMrush. Confirm:

• The link is live and pointing to your scholarship page
• The link is do-follow (inspect element or use a browser extension)
• The anchor text is clean – ideally your scholarship name or company name, not a commercial keyword

Log each confirmed backlink with the domain, domain authority score, and link type. This data is what you present when evaluating the campaign's return on investment. Tracking whether local SEO efforts are working follows the same principle: results without measurement are just activity.

The Cost-Benefit Reality for Small and Medium Businesses

Here is where honest assessment matters. Scholarship link building is not as efficient as it once was, and the economics have shifted considerably.

Direct costs:

• Scholarship award: typically $500 to $2,000 per cycle
• Staff time: research, outreach, follow-up, and link verification for 200 prospects takes 15 to 25 hours
• Optional tools: email finding tools, backlink tracking software

In 2015 and 2016, campaigns were returning 47 to 100 backlinks per scholarship at a 10% conversion rate. By 2018, that rate had dropped to around 6%, yielding roughly 12 links from 200 outreach emails. The ceiling is probably higher with more personalised outreach, but the general trend is downward as universities have become more selective.

The penalty risk is real. Adam Riemer, an experienced SEO practitioner, has documented cases where scholarship link campaigns triggered manual link penalties in Google Search Console. The risk increases when a business runs multiple scholarships, uses keyword-rich scholarship names for anchor text manipulation, or builds a backlink portfolio that is disproportionately heavy in .edu links from unrelated fields.

The relevance problem. A clinic receiving links from a trade school's scholarship page or a real estate agency linked from a medical university's financial aid section introduces topical irrelevance. Google's systems are capable of identifying this pattern at scale, and SpyFu's analysis of the tactic notes that many of these links are ignored entirely rather than credited.

For most small businesses, the scholarship route requires spending $1,000 to $2,000 on the award plus significant staff time, for an uncertain number of links with debatable long-term value. That budget often produces better returns when directed toward content that earns local backlinks organically – through genuine community involvement, local press coverage, and structured business listings that build consistent authority over time.

Businesses operating across multiple African markets, for example, tend to see stronger compounding returns from citation building and structured local data than from one-off scholarship campaigns. Destinali helps businesses in 32+ countries establish that kind of foundational visibility – the type that accumulates without the compliance risk of link schemes.

What to Do Now

Scholarship link building can still generate real .edu backlinks. Whether it should be part of your strategy depends on three factors: your budget, your risk tolerance, and how relevant a scholarship is to your actual business.

If you proceed, do it properly:

1. Run the scholarship as a genuine initiative, not a link mechanism. Name it after your brand or a cause, not a keyword.
2. Keep the portfolio balanced. A handful of .edu links in an otherwise diverse backlink profile is unremarkable. A backlink profile dominated by .edu scholarship links is a signal.
3. Build one scholarship per year maximum. Multiple simultaneous campaigns are a documented risk factor.
4. Do not use keyword-rich anchor text. Your brand name or scholarship name is the correct anchor.

If the cost or risk profile does not fit your business, the smarter path is building links through local community involvement and consistently structured business data – tactics that compound over time without the exposure that scholarship campaigns carry.

Businesses that want to strengthen their local search presence without the complexity of link schemes can create a free listing on Destinali to start building structured visibility where customers and search platforms are already looking.

FAQ

Does Scholarship Link Building Still Work in 2025?

Scholarship link building still produces backlinks, but at lower conversion rates than it did before 2018. A realistic expectation is around a 6% response rate from cold outreach to financial aid offices, yielding roughly 10 to 15 links from 200 emails. The links are often do-follow, but Google has been aware of this tactic since at least 2018 and has stated that many such links are ignored rather than credited.

Are .edu Backlinks More Valuable Than Regular Backlinks?

Not inherently. The common belief that .edu links carry special weight stems from the historical difficulty of earning them legitimately. Google's systems evaluate .edu links using the same relevance and quality criteria applied to any other domain. A contextually relevant .edu link from a research page citing your data is valuable. A link from a financial aid listing page pointing to an unrelated business is unlikely to move the needle.

How Much Does a Scholarship Link Building Campaign Cost?

The minimum investment is the scholarship award itself, typically $500 to $2,000. Add 15 to 25 hours of staff time for research, outreach, and follow-up, plus optional costs for email finding tools and backlink tracking software. A full campaign often costs $1,500 to $4,000 in real terms when time is accounted for, before the scholarship is ever awarded.

Can Scholarship Link Building Get a Website Penalised?

Yes. Cases of manual link penalties tied to scholarship campaigns have been documented. The risk is highest when a site runs multiple scholarships simultaneously, uses keyword-rich scholarship names for anchor text manipulation, or builds a profile where .edu links represent an unnatural proportion of total backlinks. A single, well-structured scholarship campaign carries lower risk than a repeated or aggressive programme.

Which Universities Are Most Likely to List External Scholarships?

Smaller institutions – community colleges, regional universities, and faith-based schools – are more likely to maintain external scholarship listing pages and link to outside awards. Many large research universities now direct students to centralised scholarship portals rather than maintaining manually updated listing pages, which reduces their value as outreach targets.

What Are Better Alternatives to Scholarship Link Building for Small Businesses?

For most small and medium businesses, local link building through community involvement, press coverage, and structured citations produces more consistent results with less risk. Creating genuinely useful content that local journalists, bloggers, and directories want to reference is a more sustainable path. For local businesses specifically, consistent NAP data across directories, a well-maintained business listing, and positive customer reviews build authority that compounds without the compliance risk of link schemes.

How Do I Find University Pages That Accept External Scholarship Listings?

Use Google search operators to locate qualifying pages: site:.edu "external scholarships", site:.edu "outside scholarships", and site:.edu "financial aid" "outside opportunities". Work through the results and save only the pages that explicitly list third-party scholarships, not general scholarship search pages or portals. Add the school name, page URL, and contact email to a spreadsheet before beginning outreach.