.edu or .com?

hello. let me begin by saying i've been reading your posts these last several weeks and have found some great information on here. so thanks for that. now, onto my question, sorry if it's a bit long winded but i want to give you a little background:

i work for an educational institution and we compete with other schools for a highly competitive keyphrase (70,700,000 results come up on google). presently we are ranked #1 (thanks in part to this site) however our position tends to fluctuate a bit- with some of our competitors often overtaking us in the rankings. we have a fair number of backlinks, far greater than our competitors, and i believe this is what enables us to rank so highly. the design of our site leaves much to be desired and our content is lacking (through no fault of my own, but rather as a result of our management being out of touch and resistant to change) so i'm fairly convinced that the backlinks are what keep us at the top of the pile. i'm constantly working to add more, and we've been going after the social network scene aggressively, which i think has also been a factor in our success.

currently all of our backlinks and advertising materials point to a .com address. a bit under 3 years ago we became an accredited institution and were given a .edu address. currently the .edu domain redirects to our .com, and i often wonder if it wouldn't be more beneficial to start using the .edu as our primary address. i should note that our .com is over 12 years old, which could factor into our high ranking as well.

i should also point out that our top 5 major competitors all have .edu addresses.

we can't afford to lose position and i fear that switching over to the .edu domain would almost certainly result in our leaving the front page entirely do to the poor design of the site, re-indexing, and need to update all our backlinks to reflect the change in address.

so what do you think? is it not worth it to switch over considering how high we are presently ranked? or would it likely be more beneficial in the long run to begin using the .edu? also, seeing as how the .edu domain is presently just sitting there, what is best to do with it if we decide to keep .com as our primary address?

i hope to hear your thoughts, thanks for reading!

That's an excellent question and I'm hopeful that some more knowledgeable than me will offer some advice. I do know that Google likes the edu extension, but that is in combination with an aged domain name.

If it weren't for the rankings concerns, which are valid, I'd say that edu is your choice, but I don't know if you'd drop to zero links when you do the change. A valid point, maybe we'll get some good answers.

why not copy everything over to the edu and run both?

I'd be careful who gives you advice on this, especially if you are already in front.