.edu backlinks.. where to point them for a scholarship

[ktrout]

Hello,

My company offers an annual college scholarship to Women in Business.   I have numerous colleges that have agreed to post our scholarship on their college websites.   I want to make sure I get the full value of the .edu backlink and need some advice.

I have a brand new scholarship page with no authority and that's basically orphaned from the rest of the website.  This page details the application process for the scholarship.   If I were to link out to my home page, and say 3-4 other top landing pages, would this be the best way to flow some of that link juice into my site?  Or is there a better way to do this?

Another thought I had was this....  I could take one of my top landing pages, www.example.com/example, and place the scholarship information on that page at the bottom, and have the school link to this: www.example.com/example#scholarship (so the scholarship info appears on top when applicants click it)--  My question here is this... becase the second URL includes an anchor, does google treat that as a different page?   Or would the pagerank flow to www.example.com/example ?

Recovering from unnatural link warnings and algorthmic penalties and trying to get the best benefit out of the new, quality links I'm building.  Any advise would be appreciated!

THANKS!

[TomVolpe]

Hi there,Because an anchor is a location on the same page, Google treats this as being the same page. This means all that link juice will be attributed to the original url.Your orphan page idea does sound like the best way to direct the flow of link juice to where you want it to be, or you could use your landing page as you said and let the pagerank flow naturally through your site via your menus and internal linking.But, if your landing page is performing well you may want to leave it as is so your scholarship information at the bottom of the page isn't stealing attention away from your call to action. This could then reduce your conversions from your best page.Each situation is different, but you're probably better off using a page specifically for this information. If you don't need it in the future, you could just 301 those lovely edu links to any page you liked.Hope this helps,Tom

[ecommercebc]

Some great advice above. Just to echo the following:

Your orphan page idea does sound like the best way to direct the flow of link juice to where you want it to be

I've done something similar to this in the past and can confirm the value will flow from .edu -> landing page -> focus pages you link to.