Education links.

[Shawn]

I've heard that educational links are given more importance over links from regular websites. Is this true? If so, would the same be true for student folders? (www.clemson.edu/~pmcloud or www.clemson.edu/~mplayer/)

I know about 80 people in college who I could get to setup their website and put links to my sites on it, which is why I ask.

[RockNRollPig]

I've heard the same thing. Actually read it in 2 or 3 different articles, but have yet to have anybody back it up.

[Shawn]

If it doesn't have any higher relevancy, it's at least equal to normal links.

It's a good way to get a large amount of free links from different IPs.

[Westech]

Shawn, I've been looking into the same type of thing. I haven't heard that .edu sites get higher importance, but I have noticed that a lot of universities have a page where they list all university-hosted student websites (with links.) This listing page is in turn linked to from one of the main university webpages, usually with decent PR. The result of this is that student web space usually starts out with at least *some* PR. At the University I attended, a newly created /~student/index.html page usually starts out with a PR of 3 or 4 once it's picked up by Google.

Makes for some interesting possibilities, doesn't it?

[chromate]

I don't think anyone could say for certain if they're given more weight. I've not really seen any evidence of it happening, just people jumping to conclusions. *If* they are though, I expect the same would be true for the student folders, because it's the domain that would be checked in the URL.

You may be able to get lots of links from different IPs, however, if local rank is in effect, then they're really not going to do you much good anyway. Even if localrank's not in play, the PR from the student websites will be pretty much non-existent unless they're developed, or have links from the main uni site. So again, they're not going to be of any real benefit.

[incka]

I think google respects sites like universitys and large open source projects (gutenburg, wikipedia, etc) more as they have more similar sites to the articles linking to them. Having links from them will increase local rank and page rank, but no more than a .com site with the exact same content and back links would.

[Shawn]

Hmm.

[incka]

So what projects do you have in development or are they secret?

[Shawn]

I have several projects operational, as well as in development.

[sitepointRefugee]

Shawn, I've been looking into the same type of thing. I haven't heard that .edu sites get higher importance, ...
Wouldn't it just be that many college, university websites launched many years ago so they have high PR? So that, generally speaking, back link from college, university sites carry some weight?

[Jaffro]

Shawn, the only way your going to know for sure is to do it. It wont hurt your site getting those links in will it?

[r2d2]

They would never hurt you - its out of your control so you cant be penalized for it.