Monday, December 29, 2008

Edu Text Links Still Work

By Steve Prylon

Search engines value the links pointing to your site as votes . This is how they determine what your site is about, and the importance and relevance of your site in relation to those words. Links from high PageRank sites are considered bigger votes. And votes from trusted and authority sites are also considered more valuable. Links from a .gov or .edu are trusted sites, and will be considered a stronger vote by the search engines.

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treated the same by the search engines is the fact that they're often ranked in the top 10, even when those sites are outdated or irrelevant.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.

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