I recently made a blog post today that I think a lot of you would enjoy reading. The discussion is about the value of .edu backlinks, history of .edu domains, and how to get some easy .edu backlinks using Google Search. I think you'll enjoy this... http://www.fishseo.com/blog/ Comments are appreciated
I don't know that I agree or disagree with what you said in your blog, but I'm going to play devils advocate. You state: What evidence do you base this statement? Is this really fact or just supposition based on what seems "logical"? If this is true, how do we know the preference doesn't stop at the '~' in URLs as the tilde is typically used by universities and colleges to denote where the official university website ends and student controlled pages begin? What is your proof that links from EDU domains are weighted more heavily?
KLB - Google seems to give edu sites more authority than non-edu links. They dont come out and say that, but it is a fact if you sift through various keyword searches. You do bring up a good point with the tilde, I suppose that question remains to be answered.
I think the key word is "seems". All this indicates is that the premise is based on supposition without hard facts. Personally I don't notice EDU links showing up all that often in the searches I do. Sure it would make sense for Google to weigh links from EDU site more heavily simply because of the TLD, but this doesn't make it true. Rather what might be happening is that the nature of the way universities create and maintain their sites tends to cause each university having a large network of interlinked sites and as the billion page spammers have shown lots of inter linking domains and sub-domains can create a great PR boost for university sites. Some universities can have dozens of different officially sanctioned websites being run on different servers by different departments on different sub-domains. On top of this by their very nature they are going to tend to attract more back linking to them by their very nature and because of their captive audience (their students, faculty, etc.). I'm not saying that we shouldn't pursue EDU links. In fact I'm very keen on getting links to my site from EDU based websites. What I am saying is that we shouldn't assume that it is a given fact that EDU sites are favored simply because they have EDU as their TLD as there is no hard evidence to support this supposition.
I have one .edu link and I haven't seen it so valuable. The way to get them? Hm try "your niche resources inlink:edu" in google.
ScottFish: For the record: not long ago I saw a thread on the HighRankings forum, with a similar title. The author claimed links from .edu and .gov domains had more weight in Google's eyes. However, all the gurus there disagreed. Because there's no real proof and their experience did not confirm that claim. Warkot
Hm, if they use TrustRank algorithm it depends what they have in the seed. Seed is manually edited. Sites are devided in two groups : a) spam sites b) good sites If they have a lot of .edu in b) than we might get conclusion that .edu are more valuable links. Anyway, to give .edu links greated importance might not be good idea for search engines. There are instances of link selling on .edu. There was one news story about link selling at Standford , where Google started. These are just thoughts. Thank you for your information.
edu sites are not given a specific boost by google. Matt Cutts has confirmed this. The fact that edu links are sometimes strong is purely because they are normally old, trusted sites with few outgoing links. Nothing to do with the .edu.
Could you please post a link here? Yes, these are my thoughts too. They just have more weight because of their age. Warkot
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-article-in-newsweek/#comment-5982 http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=matt+cutts+edu+gov+links+boost&btnG=Search&meta=
Well, I think Matt's blog comment is the best evidience we have on the whole EDU issue and it is apparent there isn't an EDU bonus, it is just that those tend to be older domains. This makes total sense.