No — scholarship link building, where a company funds a nominal student scholarship purely to get a university page to link back to it, has been treated by Google as a manipulative link scheme since at least 2011, and the tactic has aged worse, not better. For gambling and casino sites specifically, already operating in Google's most heavily scrutinised YMYL category, the risk-to-reward ratio makes this one of the easiest 'quick win' pitches to reject outright.
The pitch still circulates because .edu links look irresistible on paper: hard to buy through normal channels, and seemingly loaded with authority. What the pitch leaves out is that Google has named scholarship pages specifically in real, reviewable enforcement actions — and a gambling brand has far less room than most industries to absorb that kind of risk.
What is scholarship link building, and why did it ever work?
The tactic is simple to execute and simple to pitch: a company funds a small scholarship, often a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars, then emails university financial-aid and webmaster contacts asking them to list it on a campus scholarships page — which almost always links back to the sponsor. Vendors selling the service at scale mass-email hundreds of universities with the same template, collecting dozens of near-identical .edu links off a single sponsored scholarship.
It worked for a few years because .edu domains are genuinely hard to earn links on through normal outreach, and in gambling-adjacent SEO specifically — where real guest posts on relevant gambling publishers take genuine effort to land — a guaranteed batch of academic links looked like an unusually cheap shortcut.
Why did Google start penalizing scholarship links?
Google's enforcement record here goes back further than most SEOs realise. In February 2011, Google penalized Overstock.com for offering university webmasters a discount in exchange for product-page links; the retailer's own SEC filing estimated the resulting ranking drop cost roughly 5% of revenue before Google lifted the penalty two months later. A funded scholarship is the same exchange with a more charitable coat of paint: something of value, handed over in return for a link.
The pattern hasn't gone quiet since. As recently as 2021, Google issued a manual action against a law firm's site that named a university scholarship page among its examples of manipulative links — the firm had accumulated over a hundred near-identical .edu links off the same template, reported in detail by Search Engine Journal. Clearing it required pulling the scholarship page down, formally disavowing every link it had generated, and rewriting the reconsideration request to admit the scheme rather than blame it on scrapers.
- February 2011 — Google penalizes Overstock.com for a university discount-for-links program; the company's own SEC filing put the revenue impact at roughly 5%
- April 2011 — Google lifts the Overstock penalty after the program is shut down and flagged links are removed
- Mid-2010s — Google's John Mueller repeatedly warns that scholarship links set up purely to earn links risk a manual action, and recommends nofollow if the scholarship exists for links at all
- 2021 — a law firm's scholarship page is cited by name in a real Google manual action notice, a decade after the Overstock case
Is scholarship link building still being penalized in 2026?
Yes, under the same rule that's governed it the whole time. Google's spam policies define a link scheme as any link exchanged for something of value — money, goods, services, or a reciprocal link — and a scholarship whose real purpose is generating a backlink fits that definition exactly, regardless of how the outreach email frames it. The link-spam detection systems that devalue this pattern have only improved since 2011, which is why the tactic increasingly just doesn't work rather than visibly triggering a penalty: a university page that links out in this repeated, templated pattern gets recognised and discounted algorithmically before the link ever shows up as net-positive authority.
A handful of vendors still sell it as a done-for-you package. Treat that pitch exactly like any other link-scheme-for-hire — the risk sits entirely on the buying domain, never the vendor's.
Why is scholarship link building especially risky for gambling and casino sites?
Two things compound here that don't apply to a typical e-commerce brand. First, gambling sits in Google's most heavily scrutinised YMYL category, where E-E-A-T signals are weighted harder and manipulative link patterns are judged less charitably than in a low-stakes niche. Second, a university's financial-aid office is exactly the kind of institutional gatekeeper gambling marketing has to treat with extra care — a cash-for-link pitch tied to a casino or betting brand is a far easier 'no' for a webmaster than one tied to a mattress company, and the universities that do say yes tend to run the least selective, lowest-quality scholarship pages on the domain, which is precisely the pattern Google's systems are tuned to catch.
If a scholarship page built purely for links ever surfaces in a journalist's or competitor's 'gambling company bought college links' story, the reputational cost lands on a brand that's already operating under more scrutiny than most industries face.
What should a gambling site do instead of scholarship link building?
Put the same budget into channels built for this niche's actual constraints. A blended program of guest posts on genuinely relevant gambling and igaming publishers, niche edits on pages already ranking for adjacent terms, and compliant PBN inventory delivers the volume and relevance scholarship links never actually provided — covered in full in guest posts versus niche edits versus PBN links. If you're specifically after a rare, genuine .edu or .gov link, the two paths that actually work — a regulator's licensee registry once you're licensed, or a real research citation once you're publishing something worth citing — are covered separately in our look at whether .edu and .gov links help gambling SEO.
If a legacy scholarship page is already sitting in your backlink profile from a past campaign, don't just leave it live. Audit and disavow it the same way you'd handle any other manufactured link pattern, rather than waiting for a manual action to force the cleanup.
The bottom line
Scholarship link building hasn't been a safe shortcut since at least 2011, and gambling's heightened scrutiny makes it a worse bet here than in almost any other industry. The .edu links it promises are real, but they're recognised as manufactured the moment the pattern repeats across dozens of university pages built from the same template — and the enforcement record, from Overstock to a 2021 law firm manual action, shows Google has treated the scheme consistently for well over a decade. Spend the budget on link types actually built for this niche.
Sources
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iGaming link building & gambling SEO
Written and fact-checked by the iGaming Links team — the people who source, vet and place gambling backlinks across a network of 60,000+ casino and mainstream domains every week. Our guidance comes from running real guest-post, niche-edit and PBN campaigns for SEO agencies, iGaming operators and affiliates, not from theory.