The .edu-domain myth

Johannes Beus
The hunt for links is showing partially strange growths: besides the production of textual-garbage for short-time salvation-yielding article-directories there are the so called “edu-links” which the hunters like to bank on. The rather short theory behind this is that links from university-pages hold above-average trust with Google because ... thats just the way it is. This leads to students in US-universities who are ,by now, very engaged on the topic of how Germany grants loans. Who like to debate on the topic of searchengine-optimization and poker in university-forums and try to take advantage of every short-lived XSS-exploit.

Sadly this whole engagement is based on a faulty assumption: It is not the Edu-toplevel domain which gives universities such a high relevance in Google for their references but the backlink-structure of the domains themselves. Universities have the advantage that on one hand, in most cases they have had online representations for a long time (stanford.edu for example was registered 1985) and on the other hand they have lots of content which was and is linked voluntarily. This is a long time to (unconsciously) build a “great” backlink-structure in Google's point of view.

Now, if “pi.edu” is selling subdomains for 50 dollars a month (which has, in the meantime, completely left the index), if Stanford, after all the cradle of Google, is massively and officially selling links and every forum and blog hosted on a edu-domain is being haunted by comment-weasels, then I am not so sure if this does not rather harm the linked than help them. Just as Marcus always likes to say: “nobody ever said that linkbuilding is easy” - to orient yourself on a toplevel-domain and bet on links which are embedded in 14 link-levels of supposedly strong edu-domains is surely the wrong way to go.
Johannes Beus - on Sun (04/20/2008) at 23:25 PM

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