.edu or high PR? which is better?

I have to agree here Mike.

Most people are hung up over .edu but the majority of the links that are on these sites have been spammed forever which may in fact be harming their sites.

PR7 wins hands down.

High PR definitely wins! Do get a mixture of both though if you can. You don't want spammy links; you know, the ones with 600+ backlinks/comments that it takes the browser 2 minutes to load.

I would try to get the PR7 considering the fact that PageRank is not a linear model.

.edu, in itself, means nothing.

Don't assume that .edu backlinks are necessarily going to be valuable "just because they're .edu backlinks". That isn't how it works at all.

Domain-extensions have no bearing, in themselves, either on SEO or the value of backlinks. It's perfectly true, of course, that many .edu backlinks are very good backlinks to get, but correlation isn't causation, and it's not the fact that they're on .edu pages that, in itself, confers any "extra benefit" at all.

The point here is simply that many (by no means all!) .edu sites are also, at least to some extent, authority sites, and that's what makes their backlinks valuable ones.

Other .edu pages aren't "authority sites" at all.

I have a couple of .edu blogs, myself, but sadly their backlinks are worth no more than a backlink from any of my .com, .info or any other sites, and in fact usually worth quite a bit less, because some of my main .info/.com sites are now building up quite a bit of "authority" and some of their pages are building up some higher PR's, too.

So don't imagine that "being on a .edu site" necessarily makes a backlink better than any other sort of backlink. Sadly.

The analogy that always springs to mind, in this context, is the belief that having a "blog" rather than a "non-blog website" is going to confer extra SEO/backlink benefit "because Google loves blogs". Again, the logic here is pretty mistaken, and in the same way: it's the attribution of causation that's at fault. The reality, in this case, is simply that "Google loves regularly updated websites", and a lot of blogs do happen to be regularly updated websites. Again, correlation is not causation.

If you have a niche site about arthritis remedies, for example, a .edu backlink from a university's/med-school's rheumatology site is going to be potential gold-dust, while a student forum or blog which - like so many - is non-context-relevant and PR-0 will actually be no better at all than any other random non-context-relevant, PR-0 backlink such as an article directory.

Contrary to popular belief, it isn't the "being on a .edu site" aspect of it that gives any advantage.

Call me a skepchick, but if you ask people selling them, of course, you may hear a slightly different story.

Wrong.

If it's a spammed and irrelevant .edu link, it's still a spammed, irrelevant link regardless of where it comes from.