One of my main concerns is why you want to buy a link from a college newspaper. You might be doing this if your site relates to this niche. For instance, if it is a site about a local bar that sells specials for college kids, a store, shop or a car repair shop. On the national front, it is possible that one of the big companies like Nike or Doritos may want to reach out to the college students, and this can involve buying an online link from college sites in order to increase traffic to the company’s site. Their intentions are clear because for instance, Doritos is not aiming at increasing the search engine rankings by buying the link. The main aim of all the examples given here are to increase traffic through clicks, by reaching out to this niche. It is a well thought out advertising strategy that uses demographics. This is acceptable because the intention is clear and the companies in question have products that suit the college students if they wish to buy.
However, other sites have a different idea when they seek out the .edu-based link from the college newspaper. For instance, check the main page of the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon. Here’s a link to it.
These paid links are on a University newspaper’s site in Knoxville TN. Their intention is misplaced when you consider the products they are offering. For example, would you expect a college student in Knoxville to rent a limo in Colorado? Or worse, buy an artificial Christmas tree? Others include a restaurant supply firm, subscription to the US news and World reports, which is already available to them. This is the gravity of the issue. The main reason for companies that buy these links is to trick the search engines by linking back to sites that have trustworthy content.
However, their luck is short-lived because it is easy to find them, since it only took me 60 seconds to find links of advertisers on the college newspaper sites. This means the algorithm will notice this instantly. It becomes hard for these sites to depend on the links they have with the college newspapers once the search engines find the anomaly. This issue may not raise consequences on the advertiser’s part, but it has some long lasting effect because of the signals it will send to the bots. If your site is involved in such activities, the bits will find this out sooner than you can expect. There are other ways of increasing traffic to your site using the right target audience. As I wrote in the .edu Inbound Link Fallacies, the TLDs have two sides. They can have the best outcome or the worst. For example, selling limousines in Orlando on a Tennessee college newspaper is move in the wrong direction. The products do not relate to the audience and this means the site is only looking for higher rankings or a trustworthy site they can fit. It’ a fallacy.
