Backlinks packages: Quality vs Quantity

You've been misinformed a little, then, Chouchou: it's not quite as simple as that. ".edu" backlinks actually work rather differently from how many people imagine they work.

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.

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.

One thing's for certain, though: when people switch from a "quantity approach to backlinks" to a "quality approach", they don't switch back!