Where To Register a .edu Domain Name

So, by now you must have come across one of those fancy .edu domains on the internet. You would want them for your educational institution or organization. Definitely that domain is not intended for individual purposes. You might have come across a few like Stanford.edu, Harvard.edu, Yale.edu, etc., but what’s common amongst them all is that they are US-based institutions, we’ll come to that later.

There’s a lot of speculation going around in the SEO world that these .edu domain names receive a lot of love from Google. You could go around a few SEO forums and see that a lot has been talked about getting backlinks from .edu domains for SEO improvement.

What exactly are these .EDU domains?

Register .edu domain name

By now, you must have come across a various set of websites and what you would quickly notice is it ending with a “.com” or “.net” or a “.org”. These domains are the ones that end with “.edu”. Now that seems pretty flashy for a education institution, as the domain name itself shouts out that it’s for educational purposes. More over, many online organisation offers extra discounts for students and educational organisation, and that will happen when you or your students will have a .edu Email address.

The majority of the .edu domains are associated with an American post-secondary educational institution, as in a college or university. These universities also have to meet a strict set of criterias to get their .edu domain.

For organizations based in USA

The registration of .edu domains for institutions based in USA is looked upon by a non-profit organization called ‘EduCause’. This organization has laid down a strict set of eligibility criteria that must be met with.

Here’s what Educause has to say about  eligibility for .edu domain:

“Eligibility for a .edu domain name is limited to U.S. postsecondary institutions that are institutionally accredited, i.e., the entire institution and not just particular programs, by agencies on the U.S. Department of Education’s list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies. These include both “Regional Institutional Accrediting Agencies” and “National Institutional and Specialized Accrediting Bodies” recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.  “

 Note that institutional accreditation is required for .edu eligibility; program accreditation is not sufficient. Not all agencies accredit institutions. Some accredit only institutions, some accredit only programs, and others accredit both institutions and programs.”

You can go through their complete set of eligibility FAQ Here.

So, it’s pretty straightforward for institutions based in USA to get a .edu domain, provided you meet with all of their eligibility criteria.

For organizations based outside USA

For organizations based out of USA, there’s still a slight chance of obtaining a .edu domain from Educase under a few conditions. You organization should be officially recognized by a US state or federal government agency to avail of .edu domain from Educause.

Individual countries also have their own national domain, like “.in”, “.us”, “.ca”, etc. There are also a few educational domains based on your country, here we will talk about India. The standard educational and academic domain names in India are: “ac.in”, “edu.in” and “res.in”. For example, take ‘Mu.ac.in’, it is the official domain of the University of Mumbai.

So, your institution could go for one of these domains if it is based in india.

Where to register .edu domains?

.edu Domains usually have to follow a strict set of rules for obtaining them. Below are the list of resources you could grab an educational top domain for your institution:

EduCause: The non-profit organization that looks into the .edu domain name registration in the USA. For an institution out of USA to be recognized, Your first step is to check the List of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies and make sure that your own institution has an institutional affiliation before you start the process.

For India: You could register a nationally accepted educational institution top domain in the form of ac.in or edu.in at Ernet, the official Gov.in Guidelines for registering educational orgaznization domanes can be found here. There are many other networks that might offer these domains, but you can grab them from Ernet as it is officially a Govt. of India approved.

So, are you going to register .edu domain name for your educational organisation? What challenges or problem you are facing? Let us know and we will try to help. If you find this guide useful and handy, feel free to share it on Facebook and Google plus.

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Srikanth AN

A Shouter whose articles got mentions from the likes of The New York Times, Kissmetrics and AllTopStories. He writes articles, novels and poems; spends most of his time reading everything he could get his hands on. Srikanth is currently pursuing his Masters from The University of Illinois and holds a Bachelors in Electronics Engineering from the University of Mumbai. He is a programmer, a motivational writer and speaker.

3 thoughts on “Where To Register a .edu Domain Name”

  1. Wow! And I thought .edu is not a special case and is available just like .org and here I found something very different. This was very educational stuff I must say, thanks for sharing this info.

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