Boston College Student Sneaks EDU back-link to Tiny Dealer In Florida?

I chose Google for this thread because this shows how powerful a EDU backlink can be, for pagerank and serps.

I've been researching the Florida Used Car market for some time. Every now and then I'd see a little tiny dealer in West Palm Beach pop up in Google searches.

The other night I did a little digging and saw (according to Yahoo) they only had 11 back-links, and they were a pagerank 5.

Check out this article and you will see it's a pagerank 5 and it only has 1 external link, pointing directly to the dealer with the anchor text "used cars".

http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/rev/mt.html

The article itself is pretty painful to read, but some black hat practitioner managed to sneak it in there.

I'm really curious if the dealer even knows the value of it, and I'm wondering how much they paid for that.

I think it puts Google in an awkward situation. It wouldn't be fair to penalize the dealer because they may not know or understand. A competitor could of put it there and ratted them out via Webmaster Tools.
On the other hand, would Google actually penalize a respectable website like Boston College?

 

They would never dare to do that.

But, creeping into an EDU domain is supposedly lucrative deal.

I would try it to be done once from my side. LOL

Thanks for sharing this.

 

Hello...

Maybe SEO is being done by the son or daughter whom is webmaster thats going to that college...

Next time use the webmasters tools to snitch them out rather then threads at DP

laterz
malcolm

 

awful background to read an article. But where is used car link? Only 1 link in the end pointing to homepage

 

Motherknucker, it's there. You must be a newbie to not spot it. Use your tools man! It's not going to jump out at you. It's in the middle of the painfully boring article

 

Even the link is not clearly visible as link, it looks like just a text.
Google should penalize Boston College and "Alan Richardson" for writing a sponsored post

This is really shocking.

 

That it's an edu domain probably doesn't help but the fact that the page with the edu domain has good links to it. The edu page is a PR5.

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.c...bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/rev/mt.html&fr=sfp&bwm=i

 

yeah right
Ctrl F found the word
damn not even underlined or color change

 

Have you checked their rankings before and after the update did they came up on the update ? I thought .edu links value was devalued maybe they changed it again.

 

I've seen an advertisement of a company selling .edu links...

I think Google will devalue them soon if they haven't done already

 

the page is probaly hacked this is a common practise for some black hat..

 

If you look at their other backlinks it's obvious how they got their PR. I know PR is meaningless, but I have seen them in the serps. Not an aweful lot, but some

 

thats so gay, that cheap asshole

 

Google treat every .TLD as the same no matter if it's a .EDU or .GOV

The only difference is that those websites used to have some authority and high PR inner pages

 

The page is a sore to the eye.