.edu sites are hosting by a educational institution. If they are linking to something than it has some credibility already because it is coming from a respected institution. Most likely the link on the site was deemed to contain some educational material that is helpful to other students or learning people. I'm not really an expert on link building but this is just what I could come up with off the top of my head.
Edu links are treated just like any other links by the Google. Matt Cutts said it clearly in one of his videos.
Matt Cutts may say that but I would be suspicous of the claim that .edu links are treated the same as .com. It is very difficult to get an edu domain which alone is a good enough reason for google to give those links extra weight. But being an evidenced-based person I must admit that I've seen no reason to believe they are treated differently.
But .edu sites will more likely have a higher PageRank, and if they don't, they will definitly get some at the next update so I think it's worth buying them. (Ofcourse getting them free is even better ).
With this logic you might as well say that Google gives extra weight to .TV domains because these are more expensive and websites with pink as their background colour because they are more rare. Edu domains are just any other domain. Some of these might belong to huge universities that get natural, related links from various established media and government websites; others are worth nothing.
That's exactly it. But I do think a backlink from a .edu site has more link weight than a backlink from a .com with the same backlink quality and quantity.
Does it come directly from that link? Then why are you posting this? We are discussing how .edu backlinks affect search engine rankings and PageRank.
hajamie We are talking about SEO here i believe... Anyways, i'm not going to argue with you guys. If you do think that Edu backlinks are the dogs bollocks i have started a thread the other week explaining how to get a bunch of free edu and gov backlinks. There were a few from NASA website too.
mightyb ... logical flotation Why "buy viagra" in google has so many .edu domains on the front page? Any reason? Backlinks from .edu domains or the .edu domains themselves have higher weight regarding SEO. Someone correct me but wasn't the google bot started indexing pages from an .edu university domain name when they were recaching everything?
Possibly because spammers also thing that gov domains are something special and they go around spamming these? Ok, then in my turn il ask you this... Why "SEO" and "PC" in Google has so many .co.uk domains on the front page? Why does "X-Box" in Google has so many .com domains on the front page? Because .gov is just like any other domain.
Not really ... People won't spam for "xbox" "seo" or "pc" .. and if you ask me why .co.uk is there thats because the British are great at seo !
So how can we tell who is right and who is wrong? We can't, can we? You think that Matt Cutts is wrong and we cant really get a letter from Google can we? So its a bit pointless arguing. If you think gov links work, then go for them.
I never said I go for them, I just said that I think they are worthy at least something ... It's a debate like .. who was first ? The chicken or the egg!
If you want to see how much weight .edu links carry, just do a search for buy viagra and take a look at the results. It might surprise you.
The .edu extention alone does not add "value" to the link. In most cases .edu's have a nice history, link profile and other elements that other sites tend to work hard to get. All things being equal (which they never are, lol) a .edu link has no more weight or importance than a .com, .net or .anythingelse.