On the surface this seems a little shady – at worst, it’s evil genius at work; at best, it’s a great tip for the powers of good, legitimate SEO operations. Joe Whyte, over at HybridSEM, recommends taking advantage of .edu job boards to boost your website’s ranking in the search results.

“The Best Way To Get Link Love From .edu”

There’s been some controversy lately as spammers and malware distributors have found ways to hijack .edu domain pages to insert links to their sites. The search engines love .edu-link-love, as educational sites are given high trust ranks.

Therefore, they rank pretty darn well in the SERPs.

Whyte offered another, white-hat way of grabbing that link love, but to keep your conscience intact, you’ll have to mean what you say.

He brings the reader’s attention to job boards, where students are likely to frequent. Post a job ad there and boom, instant link love from a trusted educational site.

But even our SEO tipster puts out the caution:

Don’t get crazy with this and please do not spam these engines. I do not condone this or promote spam whoever I do advise this technique for sites that are just starting out and looking for additional help in the office. Simply put out an ad next time on a local university hiring board.

So, as long as this doesn’t fall into the wrong hands (but you know it will), it seems like a fair-game SEO idea.