For instance: If some business has a relative/son/daughter/family member in college and had some unique take on this business and wrote up a relative article about the company and linked the website from their .edu web space would that be more contributive than a .com webpage with the same PR? This scenario wouldnt have much blowback because anybody finding the article would agree it was justified by the relationship and not just webspam. I guess my question is more of, are search engines ignoring the importance of links from .edu sites that are explicitly from student webspaces?
i think search engines will not give different importance to a part of a webpage. all web site will have the same importance
That is what G says. But there are plenty of .edu websites with broken links and little contents that haven't been updated in 5 years rank extremely high.
ummm I thought it was common knowledge that .gov and .edu links have more effect on pageranks. One of my tech sites was linked by a .edu and it got to PR4 with maybe 2-3 other low PR sites linking in and no SEO effort on my part and only 4-5 months of being online with low traffic. The whole reasoning behind it was because .edu and .gov should have some sort of public integrity and therefore a link to a .com should be important and not just because your related in some way. However this shouldnt hold true with student pages since the integrity is now in the hands of a student and not a public or private institution.