Monday, December 29, 2008

Edu Text Links Still Proving To Be More Valuable

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.

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.

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treated the same by the search engines is the fact that they're often ranked in the top 10, even when those sites are outdated or irrelevant.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

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.

Yes, there are one or two naysayers still, but by and large, the industry places high value on .edu text links, as do the search engines. We will continue to run with the crowds and continue to use .edu text links. The phenomenal results we're seeing with our clients rising swiftly to the top in search tells us we're doing something right.

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