Recently there has been a lot of chatter about .edu top-level domains. From whether a .edu TLD packs more Google-juice punch to whether one can actually register one, there’s been a lot of mis-information floating around the web. So let’s once and for all set the record straight on .edu domains.
What are .edu domains?
Edu domains are those domains ending in “.edu”. Like “.com”, “.net”, “.org” and others, “.edu” domains are a top-level domain (TLD). The majority of .edu domains are associated with an American post-secondary educational institution, such as a college or university.
How do you get an .edu domain? What are the eligibility requirements?
The registration of .edu domains is governed by Educause, which limits the registration of such domains to post-secondary institutions in the United States that are institutionally accredited. “Institutionally accredited” means that the entire institution and not just a particular program or department is accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education’s list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies. Those recognized accrediting bodies included “Regional Insitutional Accrediting Agencies”, as well as “National Institutional and Specialized Accrediting Bodies”. In other words, it’s going to be very tough for an individual to register a .edu domain.
Other schools, like elementary schools, high schools, middle schools, and even charter schools are not eligible to register a .edu domain. It is reserved solely for post-secondary schools.
Are there any exceptions?
Educause did not take over the administration of .edu domains until 2001, and according to the terms of the Cooperative Agreement between Educause and the U.S. Department of Commerce, all .edu names in existence as of October 29, 2001 are “grandfathered“, regardless of all current of past eligibility requirements. Because of the rarity of these grandfathered edu domains, actually being able to find one will be pretty hard, and if you do, it will likely run you in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
An interesting domain which has raised some eyebrows in recent months is the domain America.edu, which is one of those “grandfathered” domains. America.edu recently changed hands through the sale of an “educational institution”, which permitted the continued use of the domain. At one point it was an actual institution website, and then somewhere along the line it became a bit of a spammy link-fest. Now, however, under the new ownership the site is making a turn around, seeking to be an information source for current and future college students, instructors, and parents.
Will an .edu domain give you more weight in the search engines?
While some insist that simply having a .edu domain, regardless of the site’s quality, content, and incoming links, will give you more weight with the major search engines, it’s just not true. Who says so? Matt Cutts, a top engineer at Google, in this video.
But don’t most .edu domains have exceptionally high page ranks? And don’t links from .edu sites usually pack a good punch when it comes to PageRank? The answer to both is yes, in some cases.
The reason that .edu domains typically have high PageRanks is because they are quality, respectable sites. You wouldn’t honestly expected a revered institution like Harvard to have a lower PageRank than your homegrown financial blog now would you? The same is true for why .edu links seem to carry more weight. They’ve earned it, like any other site, and don’t get any extra-special added consideration. That also means that not all .edu links are created equal, and if getting .edu links is a part of your link building strategy you’ll want to consider it carefully.
How can .edu links help me? And how can I get some?
We all like getting links to our websites, especially ones from sites with high-traffic, large followings, and high PageRanks. Getting a good quality .edu link is like getting one of those. You might get one organically by chance, but more often than not you’ll pay out the nose for premium links, or it just simply won’t be available to you.
No matter how many people you try to bribe, Stanford isn’t going to link to your SEO website from their front page, or even a sub-page. The reasons why are pretty obvious, but if you need it spelled out for you, it’s because they aren’t willing to compromise their integrity. Few, if any, schools would be willing to do that.
So how do you get one?
You can hope and pray that a school will link to you, but the chances are pretty slim that they actually will. I’ve actually been successful in acquiring numerous .edu and .gov links to a librarian-oriented website of mine, but it all happened by chance and was because it was something they found useful and relevant. The links I got were mostly on the school’s library pages, or school-run blogs (not those run by students), and I didn’t beg or ask for them.
Most .edu link sales that I see online are students selling a link on their school-sponsored blog, located on a subdomain of the school’s website. So before you get all excited when you spot one of these .edu link sales, read it over first. More than likely your link will be on fsu.edu/student/blog/jdoe, and not fsu.edu. Buying or getting one of these links is just like any other link. Does it get traffic? How much? Does it have a PageRank? How many incoming links does it have? Those are the kinds of things you’ll want to consider. Just don’t get blinded by the .edu, and you’ll be able to make a smart decision.
Final thoughts:
Getting a high-powered link from a respectable .edu domain is great, but don’t put all your eggs into one basket.
In the UK quite a lot of schools have .sch.uk and .gov.uk sites are also of great value.
Great article Julie. Probably people will start to understand and stop to blow up seo forums within the same questions.
But you forgot one method to get an .edu link from a sub page of a main web site.
Subscribe to some sort of financial request that sometimes school does.
For example many time I saw incoming links for website that just donate a bunch of $ to a school and they were mentioned over the sub page of an .edu domain.
It’s like win a lottery. You don’t know when and where. But it works.
Good post Julie. The other way you can get a link from an edu site is if your site is involved in Research that they are interested in. If you’re commercial only everything you said is right on target.
This is an awesome post. As a site that will rely on .edu links as it grows I find this post useful and thorough. Thanks!
Matt also states that student pages (with a tilde) are likely not as authoritative as university pages:
http://www.stanford.edu/students/~babycutts
All extremely true. People tend to assume .edu links are worth more than regular links. The reality is that all else equal links from .edu pages carry the same weight as other pages.
You told a very simple but mostly overlooked truth here: Most of the value people associate with .edu domains stems from mistaking a symptom with its cause.
I’m not to sure I agree 100% with the article, or more specifically what Matt says about the .edu back link strength. Sites that are lucky enough to garner a .edu back link do much better in the serps than those who, of equal PR and number of back links, do not have any. Granted there are always contributing factors, but if I had my choice I would take a quality .edu back link over anyone else almost every time!
That’s part of the argument. A quality .edu link does pass the mustard because it is *quality*, but just because a link is from a .edu domain, it is not going to make that link generally worth more than a quality link from other site.
There are a lot of students trying to pimp out their student profile pages and blogs right now, and in some areas, especially web metrics which grade websites based on .edu backlinks, whatever those backlinks may be, attributing quality is irresponsible.
On the other hand, as the article says, a true organic .edu backlink is golden … like a .gov backlink would be.
Great work and excellent discussion.
@ Andrea : Love that tip!!!
I was able to get a .edu link when a local computer club held a blogger conference and you had to sign up for it on a wiki that was hosted on the local university’s site.
I think most SEOs who have been around for a while new a lot of this. Not all edu links are the same and the ~ in a URL is a dead give away that it is not going to do much good. Plus there is that whole “no follow” thing that most edu’s incorporate.
On the other side of the coin, we just did a bit of research on which accredited schools actually offer solid SEO or SEM curriculum. You might be surprised at the results…
http://www.verticalmeasures.com/education.html
“I think most SEOs who have been around for a while new a lot of this. Not all edu links are the same and the ~ in a URL is a dead give away that it is not going to do much good. Plus there is that whole “no follow” thing that most edu’s incorporate.”
Good point but if it is a citation then they have actually used “nofollow” where Google would rather they didn’t as a citation in a university paper is “what the web was built for”! Not making the Googlenuts instant billionaires!
Only an idiot and a “johnny come lately” looking to make a name for himself thinks .edu is a booster. I can show you about a dozen pointed at a banned site and they aren’t student pages!
Arnie, do you know of any UK courses?
Liam, when we conducted the research we only searched for .edu’s so I suppose that restricted the search somewhat. Maybe phase 2 should be a search on ac.uk?
Real nice summary.
Why aren’t .edu’s penalized for not protecting their assets? We’ve all seen those 20,000 page link farms that spring up on edu’s from time to time.
I think the most of us have websites which don’t need .EDU-backlinks. Because of the following reasons
1) The bussiness we are in is too little with some good backlinks you will achieve a good ranking. So paying too much money for EDU-links while you can save that money to invest in something else.
2) .EDU-domains are made by most instances which giving good information about some products, so if they gonna take your link on their site, they will damage their trust in their visitors which gonna think they are giving the information to affilate to you to make big money.
Having said that, but many webmasters are still running around the net looking for .edu and .gov links. I personally don’t do that to rank high in SERPs. I believed that results paid off with hard work. Instead of wasting time and dollars building such links, why not spend it on on better moves such as onpage optimization and offpage optimization.
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One question. I have my website listed on the profile page of a college i studied in.
Will google count this as a incoming link? The reason i ask is this. Both google and yahoo are not recognizing two other urls on the page as links to their sites.
Krishna
Books for programmers
Great article Julie. Probably people will start to understand and stop to blow up seo forums within the same questions.
But you forgot one method to get an .edu link from a sub page of a main web site. Subscribe to some sort of financial request that sometimes school does.
For example many time I saw incoming links for website that just donate a bunch of $ to a school and they were mentioned over the sub page of an .edu domain.
It’s like win a lottery. You don’t know when and where. But it works. We had gone down in the search last month. We got some links in .edu, and it worked.
We have gone down in our serach in Google. Fortunately, we got some links in .edu and it worked great. Thanks for the artclie julie. I have seen many .edu site offering links with ~. Now i know, it doesn help much.
This is an awesome post. As a site that will rely on .edu links as it grows I find this post useful and thorough. Thanks!
.edu or .gov sites are authority sites that will definitely bring you good pagerank. But it does not come easily.
I tried http://www.edulinker.com and got several .edu links. Still have to apply but this site gives you tons of applications!
The “secret” to getting real link juice from edu sites is they MUST be from real pages, not edu/students/~freds-great-spam-page/index123
I’ve tested it, and they do work.
I belive that gov and edu sites give you better page rang and higher search position.
I have just now started SEO for my website and I was just surfing the SEO stuff, And i came to about this great Information on .edu domains, Since this article is much more older but then to I hop this information must be helpful for the current Search Engine Optimisation algorithms.
Thanks for the article. I think I could use some links from an edu site but I am not really sure how to go about it. Is there a search engine that searches for edu blogs that I can post replies on?
I have a few edu links for my site but I can’t tell if they really helped or not.
Thanks for a really good overview on the whole.edu link building thing. I was looking at purchasing an ebook on this subject, but after reading your post I think it is going to be harder than it seems to get these sort of links.
Thanks again.
anyone can share .edu links?
It’s a great post buddy. But here i don’t think anyone sharing .edu links
Its really intresting reading your post. Another aspect of generic marketing is that the results are shown at different places with google or yahoo api is used for search results