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As with most things in search marketing, people are very much divided about the value of oneway .edu links. While it was always a given that all major search engines, especially Google, seem to favor university sites in their SERPs whenever possible, opponents of this view (albeit fairly vociferous, as yet a mere minority nevertheless) are wont to point out that while most such web sites are vast, varied and well established, this doesn’t imbue them with some intrinsic ranking power to confer on those lucky sites receiving their linklove.

In other words, or so they argue, .edu links won’t do squat to help your rankings. Ok, that faction will blithely claim the same regarding ODP and Yahoo! directory links, too…

No matter: Seeing that the average SEO mindset will desperately embrace the “every little bit helps” strategy anyway, it’s hardly surprising that paid .edu links are fetching premium rates all over the place these days.

Consequently, it was only a matter of time till some smart search marketing savvy entrepreneur would come up with a way of monetizing .edu links on a big scale. In fact, we seem to have crossed that mark now: The Adison University web site offers you an entire dedicated blog hosted on an .edu site for a mere $25 “donation” per month.

And no, it’s not a scam, it works, we’ve tested it: We did indeed get our Wordpress blog once we had paid up.

Beyond the blog, you can also sign up for their directory (14,000 categories) at $30 (again: “donation”) a pop ($50 for a sponsored link). I’ll leave it to others to determine whether these “donations” are tax-deductible or not – all in all it strikes me as a pretty thin web site with preciously little original content. (Mainly Answers.com and possibly Wikipedia stuff, didn’t check it in detail.)

They’ve even got a forum with some activity here, though it doesn’t particularly impress me as maintaining any sophisticated academic level of discourse.

Unfortunately, none of this does a lot of good by way of answering that one fundamental question – WTF is Adison University?

You won’t find this institution accredited anywhere official. Google will actually ask whether you meant “Madison University” when you enter the search term, and no one I’m aware of seems to have heard of it before.

If you are up to this kind of sleuth activity, feel free to research them in greater depth and post your findings somewhere. Lacking sufficient time to do so myself, all I’ll do here is point out the snippet that a Whois research over at educause is somewhat inconclusive, giving us merely a post office box in Colorado Springs, CO for an address.

It’s also established that the site is run by one Preston White in, you guessed it, Colorado Springs, Co. He’s an SEO with his own web site, where he states:

I consider myself one of the top SEO experts in the World and have statistics to prove so.

A bold claim, to be true, but why not review his client portfolio yourself and make up your own mind.

In any case he holds control over that .edu domain, no matter how he managed it. This piece (again from educause) may offer us a clue, though the whole affair still remains shrouded in some mystery:

According to the Cooperative Agreement between EDUCAUSE and the U.S. Department of Commerce, all .edu names in existence as of October 29, 2001, are “grandfathered.” This means that everyone who already had a .edu name by that date (October 29, 2001), regardless of current or past eligibility requirements, is allowed to keep those .edu names.

Another interesting pointer is a link tucked away in an unobtrusive corner, pointing to yet another .edu mystery site, unless everyone but me happens to be aware of the Nasson Cyber Space Institute. Beyond the home page this sites offers zilch content: all blank templates.

So much for Adison University. It remains to be seen what good these links will actually do.

Alternately, if you’re entirely new to this game and would like a short, no-fluff rundown of a very basic, straightforward but quite powerful technique of getting .edu links pointing your way for free (including how to find eligible sites allowing for it in the first place), we recommend this short but very instructive, hands on e-book:

How to Easily Create 10 to 15 College and University (.edu) Links to Your Site Every Hour

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