Tuesday, October 2, 2007

.Edu and Spam

The .edu top level domain* is a favorite of search engine optimizers, as it’s considered more valuable – due to the trustworthiness and authority of educational sites – than other domains. Not so with Google ad-filled America.edu, it seems: that site displays lots of university links in directory-style, along with what looks like screenscraped content. FridayNite, the German SEO who sent this in, says he wished to have a domain like that too. “The last time I tried to get a hold of poker.edu, I was rejected,” he adds.

But considering how Google usually scales their system, it’s likely they treat .edu like any other domain – meaning these domains may on average have higher authority than non-edu domains, but only because they get a higher level of authoritative backlinks. A spammy .edu on the other hand would not get these backlinks, and thus may not be more valuable than any other domain. Indeed I’m seeing a PageRank 0 on America.edu, which may mean Google already banned the site.

*Curious how Google employees name the different parts of a URL?

.Edu and Spam by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (11)

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