People may be linking to this particular .EDU site for whatever reason and your link is there so you get a backlink. Similar to article marketing and people publishing your article on their site. And its a good thing the more backlinks you get the better unless they are spam sites.

Or you could just of had some other posts out there that you have forgotten about and Google just found them. Either way its a good thing.

You won't have 26 long-term links, but you certainly can have them after the initial post.

A lot of blogs have a "recent comments" widget. So, a comment on one post can temporarily get you links on many other pages (i've had 1k links before) of the blog as a recent comment to the blog. But, as time goes on and other people comment, your comment will fall off the recent comments. It certainly isn't a bad thing, but I wouldn't get them as 26 long-term links.

Also note, despite what the other poster stated, don't worry about incoming spam links either. They might not help you, but I wouldn't worry about them hurting you either. If they did, you could just spam your competitors into oblivion.

Tom

Sometimes you get a link on a dynamically generated page list. As the list grows, the URL of your link changes. You will see this is if you have very similar URLs in your backlink results. It still only counts as one - the results search engines (especially Yahoo) are slow to update and show accurate information.