John Mueller says a lot of .edu links get ignored

[engine]

John Mueller says Google ignores lots of .edu links as they can be quite spammy.

[mobile.twitter.com...]

[lucy24]

Then again, they could just ignore any .edu page that has a ~ anywhere in the URLpath. (What is it about universities and ~ anyway? Have they never heard of subdomains?)

[phranque]

(What is it about universities and ~ anyway? Have they never heard of subdomains?)

it's a (pre-web) unix convention.
the tilde indicates your home directory. (e.g. "cd ~" is the command to change to your home directory)
consistent with this convention you could list lucy24's home directory with "ls ~lucy24".
also consistent with this, the web url to access lucy24's home directory index would be https://(foo.)example.edu/~lucy24/

[lucy24]

Yup, and once you're in that individual person's ~directory, you can pretty well give up any idea of finding worthwhile .edu-caliber content. Especially if they let students piggyback on a university's domain; individual faculty pages are iffy enough.

[keyplyr]

I worked on a large univ library index and the back end that creates the pages including citation linking to alumni and faculty profiles. Also did a few updates on other various documents.

I can attest to the archaic practices held as standard in academia. Trying to suggest anything modern was a futile effort.

[lucy24]

<digression>

I can attest to the archaic practices held as standard in academia.

A few decades back, Harvard faculty kicked and screamed when the library wanted to move over to the LoC classification system as used by all major academic libraries throughout the US. (Smaller ones still use Dewey Decimal, which I find too funny for words.) They ended up with an awkward compromise whereby existing holdings stayed in the old catalog, while new acquisitions got LoC classifications. So there was a time when, for any given field of study, your desired books could be in either of two entirely different parts of the library.
</digression>

[martinibuster]

Mueller's statement is correct but it lacks nuance
I believe the real reason "a lot" of .edu links get ignored is because so much of the .edu space is hacked.

Do a search for "site:.edu + (obscene keywords)" and you'll see thousands of hacked .edu pages.

The .edu space is poorly administered which allows spammers to easily hack the pages.

[JS_Harris]

Broken links are another spam factor, I see people pick up expired domain names simply because a .edu links to it.