Dec
29
When search engines are crawling, they’re not only collecting information, they’re noting which sites they collect it from. And they place a value on the links that point to your site, referring to the value as a vote. That’s how they determine the content of your site. The link words are how they rate your importance and relevance. Links from some sites are rated higher than others. For instance, .gov or .edu are considered trusted sites and are more valuable, and thus will get bigger votes. PageRank sites will also get bigger votes. Basically, the stronger the site, the stronger the vote will be for an equal link from that site.
Most in the SEO industry will agree that .edu links have a higher value with the search engines, but there are always a few who disagree. In fact, it is just not true that .edu links are rated the same as other links by the search engines. A simple test will determine this: choose 2 sites, add standard links to one and .edu links to the other. Check your rankings and then run the same test several times. You’ll see that .edu text links do make a difference in site placement.
More evidence that .edu or .gov links are not treated the same by the search engines is the fact that they’re often ranked in the top 10, even when those sites are outdated or irrelevant. The fact is that .edu repeatedly ranks higher than standard links.
When you think about .edu links and what makes them rank higher, the answer is clear. If a new university were to open tomorrow, links from that site likely wouldn’t have much weight or value. But most of the .edu sites are very mature, huge, trusted sites that are full of information. And they have tens of thousands of inbound links and high PR. This is why the search engines are placing a weightier value on these links.
As with anything, there’s no way to get everybody to agree, so the naysayers who disagree about .edu links may just need to agree to disagree with the rest of the pack. Most SEO providers are seeing positive results as are we. And as long as our clients rankings are climbing to the top using quality content links, then we won’t likely abandon something that works.
