My university gives a directory to each student on their .edu domain. Would it be a bad idea to either write some related content on my homepage and link to my site or to 301 redirect? Would that likely have any positive effect on my PR?
There's nothing special about .edu domains - they follow the same rules (in terms of SEO) as any other kind of domain.
A PR7 link is a PR7 link, the domain (or domain extension) doesn't matter. So the simple answer to your question is "yes"
the problem with personal pages is that they dont link to the main page of the domain which actually has the PR value. Therefore that pr value cant pass to the internal personal page meaing that you get no PR for that page.
http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker Shows a PR7 on all datacenters except for the toolbar. Is that inaccurate?
you would get the most value out of your personal site, by having a high PR site on the .edu domain link directly to your site. Say you have a personal site about baseball. The school baseball site then has a link to your personal baseball site. hope that helps.
Which site are you talking about??? that linky just leads to the standard pagerank checker page. Which is showing as a PR5 in my toolbar by the way. if i have an orphaned page like ww.random.edu/personalpage If it does not link to the main page then no pr will pass. The same rules apply to internal pages as they do to external links. The PR has to come from somewhere. Just because its an orphaned .EDU is meaningless unless it has PR juice from somewhere.
WOW If I get a page on edu I would make backlinks for it and then generate backlinks for my own sites
I realize that. I didn't post the URL publicly for a reason It's not orphaned. The top level .edu links to all its inner pages in a directory listing of all the public homepages. My inner page shows a PR7 on all of the nameservers except the toolbar which shows a 3.
Ahh okay gotcha. Well thats pretty valuable then. There was someone else a while back that was selling an edu personal page that was orphaned and he didnt realise that its value was zilch. Thats why i was like .... what lol cheers mate
Sorry but that is total nonesense. Two PR7 .coms don't even have identical value. AND .edu/.gov are given special attention. Google is combating this as they see edu sites are being spammed however they do have higher value. Ask Aaron wall. Don't use a 301. Create a useful page and link to your other site as a resource if you like especially if it is relevant but not a 301.
What's the significance of an https page in terms of PR etc ? As far as I know, Google has no problems indexing these pages.
I didn't say anything about "identical value", I said a PR7 is PR7. And yes, I know toolbar PR is just a snapshot and no two PR7 pages are "exactly" the same. I was answering the question in the spirit in which it was asked without giving a PR lecture. A link on .edu or .gov site is not automatically "more important". From this video: "..fact we don’t really have much in the way to say “Oh this is a link from the ODP, or .gov, or .edu, so give that some sort of special boost.†Its just those sites tend to have higher PageRank because-because more people link to them and reputable people link to them." That last part is why people mistakenly think that .gov;'s and .edu's are automatically more important.