Are .edu links really boosting your ranking? Or just o waste of time...

by WilliamsDan

Posted: 13 years ago 4 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

I don't know what to say about .edu links, many people are saying that building .edu links is a waste of time because there are not relevant to the site topic and therefore google would not give you any credit for those links. And in the same others are saying that building .edu links is great to boost your rankings...

I tried to use this strategy but the results were unconcluded. I don't know what to believe anymore.

Can someone explain in detail with concludent examples that .edu linking really help the rankings?

Thanks,
Williams

#boosting #links #ranking #time #waste

MartinPlatt 13 years ago

I think the theory goes that if you have a .com site and a .edu site of the same PR, the edu will hold more weight, assuming they are both on topic. This is because scholarly information is held in high regard, which it turn means a scholar thinks the information on your site is good.

Putting comments in a profile link on a .edu site will count as a link, but it's spammy, and really is a waste of time.

I would concentrate on creating good content, people will link to it naturally if you do, or writing articles that point to your site. Quality stuff beats trying to fool the search engines.
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Martin Platt
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- Alexa Smith Banned 13 years ago
  
  .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.
  
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  WilliamsDan 13 years ago
  
  I really think you are right about this, because the key is relevance in backlinking strategys. I wasted some money on buying .edu links but I am skepchick about this because I could not see any good results from building lots of .edu links.
  
  I do believe that organic linking is the best way to increase the rankings so I will try to offer good content for my visitors.
  
  Thank you for your answers!
  
  Thanks
  
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Andyhenry 13 years ago

What Alex said. (she saves me a lot of typing these days )
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nothing to see here.
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