A Free (sorta) .EDU Link » SEO Factor

« I’m Back — Header Tags and SEO » 26 June 2007

I first read about Adison University’s blog offering from Cristian Mezei at SEOPedia. Apparently, you can sign up for $25 a month, and get your very own blog with a .edu domain. You could setup a blog, get some text on there, and link it to your main site/blog for the almighty .edu link. This, I think, is great marketing by the folks at Adison; targeting the “SEO savvy.” But those that are just a bit more “savvy” will know that there is just one problem… .edu’s don’t help.

That’s not to say a link from a .edu or .gov won’t be very helpful, but there is no special attention or reward given to inbound links from these sites. There has always been this myth that getting a link from a .edu or .gov domain would yield higher rewards, with the thought that (and rightfully so) in order to get one of these domains an organization has to adhere to a set of rules or guidelines, thus inherently proving it’s authority to the search engines, and boosting the validity of a link.

This is a great idea, but Matt Cutts himself has gone on record several times debunking this myth. However, .edu and .gov links are indeed very sought after, even by SEO’s that know the truth. Why? Well, .edu and .gov sites are normally very established and usually have a great deal of link popularity. So, if a link is given to a site, so is that large amount of link juice.

Always keep this in mind when perusing your links. It’s not that .edu’s and .gov’s get a magical boost, it’s just that they gain a lot of popularity. That being said, a link from the above mentioned blog would be no more useful than any other blog.