Monday, December 29, 2008

Edu Text Links Still Proving To Be More Valuable

By Steve Prylon

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.

The fact that .edu text links are rated higher is mostly not in dispute, but occasionally there is a SEO provider that disagrees. In fact, there are a few successful industry players that insist that .edu links have no more value than any other type link. Ad Edutextlink.com we disagree. We have run test after test and the results clearly show that .edu text links are valued higher than others by search engines.

If you do any random search, you will very often see .edu and .gov sites ranking in the top 10, even when they are not the most relevant, or even when they are outdated. This is more proof that they are not treated the same as a .com or .net.

Think of this: consider a new University opening this year, versus any average State University already in existence. The new school wouldn't likely hold much value with the search engines because it's brand new. But that State University, over 100 years old, well respected, huge amount of inbound links, full of information, thousands of hits per hour is going to be ranked high. That's just how it is. So except for extreme situations such as brand new .edu links, the overall premise of premium value cannot be disputed.

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. - 15336

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