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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.
Last time I was at an .edu domain all I saw was photos of perfectly diverse students hanging out on perfectly manicured lawns. Not really something that engendered trust.
Why would anyone have any trust in a blog just because the author is associated with a University? All sorts of Universities have faculty and students associated with them who can say anything they like on their "edu" blogs just like the .com blogs. One might think that bloggers associated with universities may be smarter or better writers, but I doubt experience would confirm this.
It seems that pi.edu is not a CHEA accredited institution. It claims founding in 1994 and accreditation by the Association of Christian Schools and Colleges (ACSC) which is not on the nationally recognized accreditation list. This means it's not supposed to be valid for them to receive a .edu TLD for their institution. They've only had it since 2006, and their technical contact uses a hotmail address according to the .edu whois on whois.educause.net.
Curiouser and curiouser.
The reason this is a worthy news story is that search engines value inbound links coming from a
My boss forwarded me the announcement this morning but I declined as to me it's begging google to blacklist you.
Here's a bit from the email... Many webmasters are paying a lot of money for a single page or link on an EDU domain. So could you imaging what you could do with an EDU Blog that you control and write posts to whenever you want for only $50 per month? Any webmaster that knows a bit about web marketing could turn one of these EDU blogs into a marketing powerhouse and money maker very easily. That's why your comment is irrelevant...to some extent the people that utilize these services don't care about their reader or what they trust or don't. They care about what the search engines trust.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
For those who were not aware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu#Other_uses I personally find it a bit sad, but what are you going to do with grandfathered domains? -JAK
Many universities make use of Blackboard software for the online portion of their courses. Blackboard gives its users a doubleclick cookie when logging in.
There are a few schools in my area (Southeast Michigan) that have fast food in their cafeteria. Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, McDonald's, etc.. It's far from universal, but it's becoming more prevalent as schools try to cut costs and increase revenue.
It's no secret that WWW.PI.EDU not a major university - no surprise there. However, they do have an online certification program. Before I came involved, PI.edu spoke with SEOs and link brokers who advised them to sell links and basically become a paid link farm to monetize the site.
Sure they would make money in the short run selling links, but creating a huge blog community offers them a much greater opportunity to capture a large web presence and traffic. Also, paid blogs are not against any of the search engine terms of service - no matter what the TLD.
With the blog community PI can achieve the high standards of an edu while at the same time improving their core product with revenues earned. Whether you agree or not with online certification programs, this is a different issue.
What I am helping PI.edu do is create a blog community with a strong educational slant. Our TOS requires us to be very strict as to the quality of our member blogs - and yes, the TOS will be enforced. Since we are charging very little per blog, it is not a big deal for us to refund and delete a garbage/link spam type blogs.
Blogs.pi.edu just launched yesterday and there was an unexpected surge in blog sign ups. Thus we have not filtered many blogs out yet. Also, many people bought sub-domain place holders and have not posted yet so we cannot make a judgment on quality of many blogs. Rest assured, blogs that are not up to standard will be given a warning, and deleted and refunded if they do not meet our TOS.
There are many paid blog communities out there; the only difference is our bloggers will have an EDU after their domain and all blogs will need to meet certain quality requirements. The grand plan is to build the blog community into a high traffic blog community - the fact that it is an EDU will help speed the process. But first we are taking baby steps and hopefully people will not continue to pass judgment based on a TDL or before we get a chance to get the site of the ground.
I also hope that the search engines will judge and rank each blog and the PI.EDU blog community on the quality of content rather than the fact that the domain TLD is EDU. Believe me, if I didnâ(TM)t do this project, someone else would be turning this site into an under the radar EDU link farm.
People are being naive if they don't know that many of the top universities have 100% commercial blogs and blog posts for sale by students and faculty alike. Many major universities also have entire sections of their domain for sale to those willing to pay the price. I guess they are under the radar because their size and the search engines have trouble sorting the wheat from the chafe. From what I seen, people that own these underground EDU pages seem to be getting a nice rankings boost.
The Blog.PI.EDU difference is that we are creating an open blog network, we have higher standards, and we are in plain view for all to see and grow. Sure, we may have some growing pains, and will not be perfect but what website is?
They appear to be offering degrees in Missouri without certification from the state. I think the Missouri Department of Higher Education will take this seriously. It's a criminal offense.
I also reported the lack of accreditation to Educause, so I imagine their registration will disappear in due course.