Why .EDU Links Outweigh Your Cousin’s Trackbacks

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Everyone seems to be in the market for high authority back links. That’s good because there are a lot of them out there. But what exactly is a high authority back link?

The link building part of search engine optimization has been around long enough for most people to have read up on it enough to know that you should be seeking high PR links from relevant websites within your niche. But to be honest with you, high PR links from sites outside of your niche are good links just as well. But .edu links, are they worth it?

Well, in a word, yes. Google favors links from sites with high authority within their niche. The thing about .edu sites is that they are educational institutions. The only websites with a .edu domain name are colleges and universities, institutions of higher learning. When these institutions build a website they take great care to ensure that the information they include on their sites are accurate and reliable. That’s why .edu sites are considered high authority websites no matter what their PR rating is. A PR 5 .edu site is as valuable as a PR 6 .com site simply because of the authority that is transferred from the .edu domain extension.