.edu and .com of same PR. Which is better?

[Digital Marketing]

Like if you have a backlink from a PR 4 .com and one form a PR 4 .edu. Which is better?

[goodroi]

Simple answer - Whichever link is more likely to bring relevant traffic to your website.

More complicated answer - .edu are generally no more useful than .com when all things are equal. Simply having two pages displaying identical toolbar pagerank does not mean all things are equal. It does not even mean they have the same pagerank since toolbar pagerank is not always accurate and often very out of date.

Here is a partial list of things to consider when evaluating link power.

1) How many inbound links are there to the page linking out to you? Also what are the quality of links?
2) How many outbound links are on the page linking out to you?
3) How many internal links on the page linking out to you?
4) Where is the link placed on the page? (within content, sidebar, footer etc.)
5) Is this a text link or image link?
6) Is the page that is linking to you on the same topic or off-topic?
7) Will the link generate any real click-through traffic?
8) How often does the page change?
9) How long will this link be pointing to your site?
10) What has changed to the pages/websites in the last few months (since toolbar pagerank is notoriously out of date)?
11) How much will this link cost you in money or time & resources?

Feel free to add on other factors that you look at when evaluating link opportunities.

[Planet13]

12) How likely is it that your direct competitor(s) will ALSO be able to get a link on the same page?

[zerillos]

The .edu is less likely to lose its pr in time. And also, i bet pr4 has a lot of inner levels which are not public. Do you really think they categorize all the websites in just 10 steps?

[tedster]

Yes, PR has many levels of granularity that the toolbar doesn't show. Several years ago I heard a Google engineer say at a conference that internal PR was calculated to 8 decimal places - and the scale is (roughly) logarithmic.

Also page's PR "vote" is split up among all the links on the page. It's no longer the case that one link gets one share of the total vote - that was just the original patent. Still, a link from a page with 3 outbound links gets a lot more pop than a link from a page with 100 outbound links.

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It seems to me the core of this thread's question is whether Google uses the TLD directly in their calculations, and the answer to that is definitely "No". There are grandfathered .edu domains (from before Educuase had the controls) that are really junk. They have no real trust or authority, and no link from them will help very much. It is trust and authority that mean the most, not toolbar PR.

There are also some university domains that have been the source of so much spam and lack of reasonable administrative oversight, that whatever the toolbar says is not likely to show up as a real influence.