.edu domains

how much are .edu domains favored?

[daneosporin]

So we all know google like .edu domains. Out of curiosity I've been trying to estimate how much they are favored.

Holding all other things equal how many incoming links do you think a .edu would need to rank the same as a .com?

In my opinion the .edu's need about 20% of the links a .com would need or they are ranked 5 times better.

[joaquin112]

the reality is that nobody knows. A guesstimate would be exactly the same, though I am not sure =)

[G_Smitty]

I have many .edu sites linking to me one way. I believe this is one of the reasons why I am ranked alot higher than my competitors.

[getxb]

I have many .edu sites linking to me one way. I believe this is one of the reasons why I am ranked alot higher than my competitors.

True. But apart from .edu sites google also favor .gov and .org sites a bit more than the rest but the degree to which they are favored can only be speculated.

regards,
getxb

[ganderla]

Do you really think .org sites are favored?

I can agree with the .edu and .gov, but a tld that anyone can buy is ridiculous.

[arran]

I don't think it's a case of .edu and .gov being favoured per se, but just that these sites tend to exhibit all the signs of quality SEs love - in particular their set of backlinks.

arran.

[getxb]

I think there are quite a few .org sites around which are really good in nature. The visitors also visit them on a regular basis. Apart from bls(and ...) google favor sites that are favored by visitors. Again if a site is a quality one its bls will increase automatically. The webmaster wont need to send zillions of requests to increase bls.

So its not a question of how many bls less a .edu/.org/.gov site needs compared to a .com site. Rather its a question of how much successful the site is in fulfilling the visitors demands.

regards,
getxb

[daneosporin]

As far as .org goes I think these only rank better if Google can establish that they actualy are a non-profit. How they do this I'm not sure, possibly human reviews, or maybe there's a list of qualified non-profits that Google manually increased the links weight on.

[martinibuster]

What is a bls?

[walkman]

or it could be that .edu simply have more PR. If you look at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia etc., they all have 9+ PR, and many high PR sites link to their site subsections (NASA might link to Harvard's Astronmy site for example, CDC to the Medical School and so on.) Plus, many of the sites interlink between each other, as researches and profesors link to each other regardless of the institution. Eventually, some PR leaks to member sites...

[arran]

What is a bls?

Backlinks?

[martinibuster]

Maybe he means IBLs?

[getxb]

By 'bls' I meant backlinks. Next time I will try to use the complete words rather than their short forms.

regards,
getxb