Do .edu backlinks really work?

As the title states "does .edu backlinks really work?".

Do they need to be related to your niche or will any .edu link be great for your search engine rankings?

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/387454-have-you-actually-tested-value-edu-links.html. One of many threads already on BHW.

I've used .edu links before and they weren't anywhere near as powerful as I had expected (they were profile links). I do believe strongly that contextual .edu links are worth something though.

they dont work for me

one .edu backlink will carry more weight than a standard backlink, but profile .edu's are as powerful as other claim them to be. Contextual linking is the way forward, .edu or not.

I've read that the only reason that .EDU's seem to be more powerful than normal, is because they usually have a higher page rank than average sites (Simply because they have the .edu extension and more people will reference them).

In my experience, i haven't had much more (if any) benefit in using .edu links over regular links on similar Page Rank domains and pages.

Google has stated that edu backlinks are no more valuable than other backlinks, however, as stated above, it is common for edu backlinks to have a higher PR. The downside is most of the backlinks are from forum profiles and they are pretty much worthless unless you get google to index them.

Any web site that has many links incoming will have high page rank and pass more link juice. Educational institutions have an enormous amount of backlinks linking to them in a huge quantity and varieties.

Link juice is actually a calculation based among other things the incoming links to the domain. But edu sites allow very few outgoing links, so these links pass more link juice.

Anytime you build an .edu link behind a username and password it is probably not going to get indexed, and will do you no good.

Also it is not just a matter of PR, there can be two sites with the same PR and still one can have a huge amount more authority, making theory link more valuable. The Harvard law School has more authority than Houston community college. This means that a PR4 page on Harvard will pass more link juice than one from a PR 4 page in Houston CC, all other things equal.

Profile links, ,edu or not, are useless unless they are on a public page.

I agree that after years of massive .edu/.gov spam, links definitely lost their value.

Personally I noticed the following: If you have an informational site yes - if you use them for ecommerce sites for example it actually can harm rankings, because it is absolute unnatural when an edu site links to a shop.

Profiles are useless as all the other profiles, too. I never get any benefit from profile links these days - no matter if manually build, high pr build, edu, gov, ect...

The only thing I can confirm is: Massive .Edu Forum Profile spamming does not work and can even harm...

Tried with 5 different sites

google say no.

the_demon said:

I've used .edu links before and they weren't anywhere near as powerful as I had expected (they were profile links). I do believe strongly that contextual .edu links are worth something though.

Click to expand...

Does it necessarily need to be contextual on a site with high pr?