18
Jul 05

Links from .edu’s

by Andy Hagans Research with 26 Comments

A question for our expert readers: What’s the skinny on .edu links?

My own opinion is that they probably are valued as more important than a “normal” .com, .org or .net link. It may be only a “weak” indicator of quality, but current algo’s seem to be using almost any quality indicator, however weak. That said, I am not sure if the boost is anything spectacular, however it may help a site gain authority in the eyes of a SE (or help it get out of the sandbox).

The question is asked in a WMW thread, Links from student edu pages:

willybfriendly: .edu links are nice, but don’t “rank” differently than any other link.

…

alphacooler: We DO KNOW that .edu links are weighted very heavily with the engines.

What’s the verdict?

26 comments - add your's now

Andy Hagans (07/18/05 at 4:15 pm)

Somebody comment already!

graywolf (07/18/05 at 5:50 pm)

I know a “friend” who had a whole .edu subdomain stripped of PR for linking to some sp@m about 2 years ago.

Andy Hagans (07/18/05 at 6:00 pm)

hehehe you should have seen my old page (just went down, i believe)

Jarrod Hunt (07/18/05 at 6:24 pm)

I know of several sites that are doing very well from .edu links. I’m sure that they dont have the authoritative power that they used too, but from results I have seen they are definitly more powerful then an average link.

Esoos Bobnar (07/18/05 at 8:09 pm)

There’s millions of college kids with dorky little one-page “personal web site” hosted on .edu domains.

Perfect targets for a massive “trade pizza for links” marketing campaign.

Or, if your site offered access to something they wanted, you could easily offer them free access in exchange for a link. Gambling sites could make a killing in acquired links this way.

Esoos Bobnar (07/18/05 at 8:14 pm)

BTW, maybe it’s just me, but does WMW have the world’s crappiest login system or what?

I mean, how about a redirect to the page I actually clicked on after I log in? My 11 year-old cousin could do that bit of programming.

Randy Ray (07/18/05 at 10:26 pm)

This is another one of those questions where the correct answer is “It depends”. I know of .edu’s where you can buy sitewide links on hundreds of pages, but your link is one the same page as about 100 other links for online pharmacies, online casinos, and web hosting comparison sites. In that case, I think that any additional authority that the .edu might give you is easily negated by the reputation of the sites that are becoming associated with you from where you link.

On the other hand, let’s say for example that you’ve got a website about copyright law, and you get a backlink from a professor’s list of online resources. That’s a power link.

AussieWebmaster (07/18/05 at 10:42 pm)

Love the pizza for links idea

Andy Hagans (07/18/05 at 11:33 pm)

hehe yep… creative link building yields the bestest links.

#10

Al Dugan (07/20/05 at 2:58 pm)

I don’t think search engines care what domain extension a site has at all and it doesn’t make sense that they would. Just like they don’t care about file extensions either. You can get a web page with a file extension of .mad listed in Google if you felt like it.

#11

Andy Hagans (07/20/05 at 3:26 pm)

>it doesn’t make sense that they would

if TLDs are a quality indicator it is certain they are using that data. the question is, IF they’re a quality indicator. I think they are a quality indicator (similar to .gov’s) because not ANYONE can get them.

#12

mike (11/26/06 at 11:45 pm)

I found an edu site chatroom. They do not have no follow links yet. I will list it when I find it again. I think it was a linux site. If you find any contact me at http://www.ehlinelaw.com

#13

Bill (12/21/06 at 7:40 pm)

well I found a great .edu site its great for only 600 a YEAR you will get a PR 6 .edu site Wide

email me

#14

Eric Ward (12/22/06 at 2:05 pm)

OK, sorry for taking so much space, but…

The mere fact of having a bunch of .edu IBLs means nothing by itself. An .edu IBL is nothing more than a potentially trustworthy signal, but this requires more algorithmic analysis to validate it’s legit/earned. Jeez…hundreds of wide open professor blogs exist where you can link spam if that’s your objective. But don’t, because, well, it’s slimy and sooner or later any algo worth a damn will figure it out. Plus, again, it’s slimy. And don’t kid yourself with rationale like “well, we sell trombones, so if I post a link to my site on this music professsor’s blog, that’s not really spam”.

.edu’ IBLs help, if it’s the right .edu page pointing to the right type of content. Or they can hurt, if it’s a .edu link that has other signals of intent to indicate that the link wasn’t trustworthy/earned by quality.

It isn’t hard to tell a student page from a department page by algo alone. We were doing this in 1993 when me and another fellow ran the site wide search engine for all of The University of Tennessee’s web servers. We ignored student pages just by adding a a few lines of code to the crawler script. That was nearly 14 years ago.

If you don’t think Google is up to the task of
spotting junk links, you are either very brave or very foolish.

Do not seek links from edu’s for search rank, seek them for relavancy and sound business reasons. Those types of .edu IBLs will likely end up helping your rank too, because they are harder to get, and more algorithmically trustworthy.

See/read
edu Link Fallacies Explained
http://www.ericward.com/articles/edu_link_fallacies.html

Eric aka LM

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