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Marketing On a .EDU Domain
wrttnwrd, an Internet marketer, opens a can of whup-ass on
LinkAdage and the Pickering Institute, which have teamed up to rent blog space on a .edu domain for $50 a month. Technically legal maybe but undermining of the trust a .edu engenders.
And anyone savvy enough to know the difference should also be sceptical enough to not get suckered.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The site is located at: http://blogs.pi.edu/ and if you visit the parent site: http://pi.edu/ it looks less like a school and looks more like one of those over-the-internet places... but with very little actual information. It makes me wonder if they obtained the EDU status by some technicality to begin with... there's no evidence this "school" has any students.
It looks they use that same blog software on their home page, I'd say it's pretty obvious this whole set-up was with selling blogs in mind. Think about it: "pi.edu" that's prime internet real-estate.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Does the "Pickering Institute" even exist? Their home page is a WordPress blog. They have no contact information other than an e-mail address.
Their domain registration has an address of "2 Cityplace Drive, Suite 200, St. Louis, MO", which is also the address of Bin95.com, which does industrial equipment maintenance training.
Your information is outdated. According to Internic (http://www.internic.net/faqs/org-transition.html), .org was originally intended "for organizations that weren't commercial entities, educational institutions, network providers, or governmental agencies. In recent years registration in .org has become open and unrestricted (it will stay that way under its new operator.)"
"It's 2008. I think the idea that educational institutions are anything but commercial meat-grinders has expired."
Honestly, most people have either not figured this out, or are in complete denial about this.
The article was written well but they guy didn't touch on what people will be doing with these sub domain names that is bad as well as how the SEO industry works. So I'll try to touch on this a bit. .edu domain names are considered a cash cow in the SEO/link selling industry. On many of the link exchange and link selling sites if someone is selling links on .edu domains you can see the monthly costs for a link on one of these sites sell for sometimes hundreds of dollars. Thankfully .edu links are very rare, but sometimes people get access to posting links on these domains; don't ask me how but I'm guessing it happens through bad practices.
.edu domains? Well most search engines assume that anything connected with a .edu domain is very relevant to what ever topic you have on the domain, and links going out of the domain are very relevant as well to the subject matter. Normally .edu domains will get very high page rank (google ranking) and will show up very fast and get a top listing with very little content or back linking. This means seo, link sellers, and blog spammers will try to take advantage of this as quickly as possible. I checked some of the biggest link selling/blog spamming sites and thankfully a link to this blog site has not shown up, but I'm sure now it will very quickly.
But why do people care so much about getting links on
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