.EDU Hell? Are they really worth the cost?

Overrated.

They only give better juice as typically the sites have been built properly with a natural back-linking profile which generally results in them having a high PR.

But remember a link on a new page held on a .edu domain will give you no extra benefit than the same on a .com.

Sam

After all i have READ i would say they are definately worth it but i can't tell you for 100% sure because i havn't actually tried it out myself :/

The whole thing's just an urban myth of internet marketing.

.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 on 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 (as with so many other things in internet marketing) if you ask people selling them, of course, you may hear a slightly different story.

I acquired several .EDU backlinks before. I think around 20.

Had one of my assistants use it to one test site.

After a month, nothing changed. That was just right after Panda.

Alexa did it again (thanks).

They're hyped up by SEO vendors who want desperate people to pay more for them by telling them they get special treatment.

I test this stuff all the time and I regularly test people's services to see if things change.

At this time my experience is - They're irrelevant and no better or worse than any other type of link.

If you can get ANY link that is on a high PR, high traffic, relevant website for your niche and it is given in-context prominence and with an attractive link - it doesn't matter what the domain extension it's from is.

You can get 10000 .edu links from spamming college blogs and they won't be worth one decent link from a .info site.

Don't get seduced by all the hype around these things.

I always figured having backlinks from .edu sites wasn't going to be of much value. I think the same holds true of having your site listed in Demoz or in the Yahoo directory. I don't have any sites in either so I wouldn't know for sure if that is accurate.

Both .EDU and .GOV has great importance in sight of search engines but you may have got lots of spammy backlinks with 100s of OBLs which leads you to negative way.

I would get them if the price is right, just keep a good mix of things as Google seems to be changing it's mind like British Weather :-)