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

All the education you need!

[billy901]

A legal loophole that exploits school should not be allowed. Not only do our tax dollars go to school so that they can have .edu domain names, but they are being exploited. On the other side, this will make a lot of money! I have to applaud the people who made this because they were smart and will make a lot of money. This will likely be a large blog, based on some stats I have of old blogs.

Re:All the education you need!

[edlinfan]

As far as I see it, advertising on an EDU is perfectly ethical if it is used to subsidize bandwidth (and NOT line the pockets of a greedy bureaucrat).

Not only do our tax dollars go to school so that they can have .edu domain names, but they are being exploited.

And when the schools introduce a method of reducing their need for your hard-earned money, you complain?

Re:All the education you need!

[Seumas]

I don't see what the problem is. If it's okay to advertise mcdonald's on a child's report card, stuff his school full of taco bell, pizza hut, subway as well as pepsi and coke machines and pump "educational" television feeds with customized advertising to them in the class room, then what's wrong with a banner ad or something on a *.edu?

It's 2008. I think the idea that educational institutions are anything but commercial meat-grinders has expired.

Re:All the education you need!

[Belial6]

"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.

Re:All the education you need!

[Chaos1]

I originally posted this in the grandparent by accident... but where exactly do you live where this goes on? I have never seen anything like this on my child report card, nor have they ever been fed fast food outside of school trips. I'd be sure to kick some school board butt if they tried.

Re:All the education you need!

[Nullav]

And when the schools introduce a method of reducing their need for your hard-earned money, you complain?

Loudly, and until they take a cut in funding to make up for their new source of revenue. They can profit on it when they stop receiving funding for whatever they're using to make more money.

Re:All the education you need!

[JorDan Clock]

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.

Re:All the education you need!

[Daniel Dvorkin]

It's 2008. I think the idea that educational institutions are anything but commercial meat-grinders has expired.

No, the idea is very much alive. The existence of these various outrages doesn't mean the idea is dead; it means we should fight against the new outrages that pop up.

Re:All the education you need!

[WNight]

The problem is that they're government schools. They get your kids, and your tax money, no matter what. Basically, they just aren't accountable to any of the groups that the people feel should be their bosses, the parents as taxpayers, or the children as the receivers of the teaching. Instead, schools are indebted only to our system of handouts and meeting those arbitrary metrics.

I'd stop dealing with a private school that did this, but as a public school they get to double-dip, taking tax money *and* getting paid for pushing marketing on the kids, and the government keeps stuffing kids in with hardly any concern over the desires of the parents or students.

It's not the poorest schools that are doing this either. If this was some inner-city crack-shack that was doing this to afford rat traps, or school breakfasts, it might be forgivable. Instead it's always some fairly wealthy school (who wants to advertise to poor kids?) that's seeking ever more money.

You can tell how much a school really needs money by how closely its administration building (where the principal/dean is most of the time) matches the condition of the rest of the campus. If one is posh and the other not, the school (like many) has a lot of fat to cut in administrative areas before they really get close to needing money. If on the other hand administrators work in worse conditions than students, they probably do need the money.

It's a tax-based thing, I can't pick a school I trust and fund it - my taxes go to help the badly run schools that spend more on admin toys and pompous architecture than teaching as much as they help any other school. Because of that I do fight schools' tax grabs, like all other tax grabs, because I have absolutely no oversight over that money once they take it and I can be sure they aren't as careful with it as I would be, nor half as useful to students or society.

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.

Re:Trust in .EDU domains

[wrttnwrd]

That's what drives me nuts about this. We're a fairly sophisticated audience. The average web user sees a .edu and thinks "Oh, information!". I see this every day, trust me.

Re:Trust in .EDU domains

[binaryspiral]

That's what drives me nuts about this. We're a fairly sophisticated audience. The average web user sees a .edu and thinks "Oh, information!".

I see this every day, trust me. Funny, when I see a .edu tld, I see student loans... :(

Re:Trust in .EDU domains

[hcmtnbiker]

That's exactly what I say. Let them taint the .edu TLD, because it SHOULDN'T be trusted. Just because a source has the .edu tacked onto the end of it doesn't mean anything besides that the author has access to a school network. Stop making things more then what they are, .edu is just a TLD for schools to have so you don't have to go "hmm... was that dartmouth.com, dartmouth.org, dartmouth.net???"

Really? who looks at .edu?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Very few link clickers look at and parse URLs and very few really know the difference between .edu, .net, .com etc.

And anyone savvy enough to know the difference should also be sceptical enough to not get suckered.

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.

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:Interesting to say the least...

[OverlordQ]

Not to mention somebody tried to eBay the school last year.

Re:Interesting to say the least...

[fropenn]

CHEA does not accredit individual schools - CHEA works at the next level to ensure the quality of accreditors who in turn perform the accreditation of individual schools.
http://www.chea.org/pdf/chea_glance_2006.pdf

There are many, many .edu domains that do not represent accredited institutions. The problem is that you could get a .edu domain without consideration of your accreditation status before 2001 - in 2001 everyone with a .edu domain was "grandfathered" and allowed to keep that domain even if they were not accredited. I'm not sure what the rules are on transferring a .edu domain, but that might be another possible way to obtain a .edu domain without being accredited.
http://www.educause.edu/edudomain/eligibility.asp

Some tips on determining whether or not a .edu domain represents an accredited school are described in this site:
http://www.chea.org/degreemills/default.htm

About the site

[FredFredrickson]

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.

Re:About the site

[nacturation]

Think about it: "pi.edu" that's prime internet real-estate. I don't know... it all seems a bit irrational to me.

Re:About the site

[FredFredrickson]

If you try to "register" for this school, it's $100 registration charge. They have a form for credit cards, but it's not secured, and if you put in an invalid card (or invalid data anywhere on the form) it accepts it and says "Thank You"

The whole thing's a scam.

Funny, zero comments on blogs.pi.edu..

[nobodyman]

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Somehow I have a feeling that my comments won't see the light of day.

Is the "Pickering Institute" for real?

[Animats]

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.

Re:Since when does .EDU infer trust?

[Dachannien]

Somehow, it seems strangely on-topic in this thread to be overly pedantic about the difference between "infer" and "imply".

So, to answer your question: never, but not for the reason you think.

Hypocrisy, slashdot.org is thy name

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'all got some big brass ones to post an article like this... aren't .org domains supposed to be for non-profit organizations, et al?

Anyone else notice that slashdot.com redirects to slashdot.org, and not the other way around, as it should?

Hey, I've got no problem with Slashdot being a for-profit venture: I'm rooting for you, honest I am. But, for the sake of all that's nerdy, how about a little less hypocrisy and a little more honesty in advertising?

Yes, I know: "I must be new here".

Let the modbombing begin!

Re:Hypocrisy, slashdot.org is thy name

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)"

The rules are not static

[EmbeddedJanitor]

So currently Google uses the .edu to pump up page rank. So what! When anyone tries to game the system it is easy enough for Google to just change this part of their page ranking algorithm to compensate (eg. don't add the .edu + modifier if the page is a blog). People have been gaming the system forever and Google have been combating the gaming too.

Re:The rules are not static

[Galactic Dominator]

Yeah, it really easy to change google algo now isn't it? I mean what it only took them 4 years to come with an answer to google bombs? There is far more involved than a simple algo change.

People have been gaming the system forever and Google have been combating the gaming too. That's kinda the whole point now isn't it? Except this to some extent is virgin territory for google --edu's are part of the foundational base of PR. The tone of your post would seem to indicate you believe google has done a decent job keeping up with the gamers of the system. I guess that's a subjective topic, but google's main motivation is to disallow PR being a bought and sold commodity, and if you're judging on that basis alone google is a miserable failure at enforcement.

There are several vanity .edu domains

[koavf]

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

Probably should have changed the default wp passwd

[jdigital]

Woops...

:)

Yes they are!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

They emailed me a diploma!

Scam

[mbulge]

More proof that not even the editors read the links. The "about" page of the .edu in question links to a Rickroll video, and the application for registration immediately asks for credit card info using poorly written English. I suspect people will be more likely to fall for this because of the edu domain, which is a shame.

At least attempt to look legit

[drumguru]

Wow, absolutely amazing. Not only do they ask for credit card info on a page that doesn't use an SSL cert but at the very top of the page they say "Please Complete This Form For Our Convenient." I noticed they don't offer an English major though ;)

Re:Probably should have changed the default wp pas

[jdigital]

the odd link is a rickroll now.

Re:Almost as bad as ...

[Nullav]

As long as it's not for profit, I fail to see how selling ads goes against anything on a .org site. Then again, how many people really associate non-restricted TLDs with categories? How many non-commercial .com sites do you come visit every day? It seems like a lot of sites just use it because it sounds better than '*.that-other-tld'. Just imagine 'Slashdot.info'.

Re:Almost as bad as ...

[Heembo]

.org's are unrestricted domains. There are no rules governing behavior on .org - it's just like .com. Anyone can get their paws on a .org and use them for profit, legally.

Why this could be bad

[blanks]

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.

But why do people care so much about getting links on .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.

I've reported this to the authorities

[grouse]

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.