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.

Comments

Trust in .EDU domains

[Mrs. Grundy]

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.

Interesting to say the least...

[RasputinAXP]

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.

Re:Really? who looks at .edu?

[Galactic Dominator]

The question of whether a user knows the difference between .edu, .com etc is not the point(although I would disagree in that most users would trust an .edu result over .com those that are capable of using a search engine anyways).

The reason this is a worthy news story is that search engines value inbound links coming from a .edu over equivalent .com page/site. It would be much easier to game the system by building up PR and trust for the .edu domain and then either selling high-weight links off it, or use it benefit your own company's site(s) and the organic keyword specific to them.

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.