College Websites Have Nearly 3 Times as Many Sites Linking to Them as the Typical Website
The typical college or university website in Diib's data is linked to by about 298 other websites, nearly three times the typical site. Its Domain Authority score is about twice as high.
If you run a school or college, other education sites likely have a strong head start in links, which helps them show up in search. A school in the bottom quarter of this industry has a small fraction of the links that the best-linked schools have.
Links from other websites, often called backlinks, are one of the signals search engines use to judge how trustworthy a site is. College and university websites collect far more of them than the typical website.
The measures here are referring domains, the number of different websites that link to a site, and Domain Authority, a 1-to-100 score from the SEO company Moz that estimates how well a site is likely to rank based largely on those links.
What the data shows
- More linking websites. Across 942 college and university websites, the median was about 298 referring domains. Across roughly 203,000 websites in all industries, it was 104.
- Higher authority. The typical college site had a Domain Authority of 21, against 11 for the typical site.
- A long tail. The top quarter of college sites had 1,592 or more referring domains, while the bottom quarter had 73 or fewer.
What this does and doesn’t tell you
These figures are aggregated from websites connected to Diib, using link data as of late October 2026. Domain Authority is a third-party estimate, not a score Google uses. The data doesn’t show which sites link to colleges or why, though partner schools, student organizations, news coverage and research citations are common sources for education sites.
What it does show is that education websites usually start from a stronger link profile than most small businesses, and that the gap between well-linked and thinly linked schools is very large.