That Joe Whyte sure has been busy lately. With the amount of time he spends on IM pestering me and Jane, I'm astounded he had the time to get a new site up and running and post this entry about how to get links from .edu sites. Basically, he urges you to find .edus who have a job posting section and then post job openings. A lot of the job opening bulletins allow you to post your company's website, which is exactly what Joe did.

Joe's idea is a good one, but what if you're actually not looking to hire anyone? It's kind of crappy to get a bunch of starving students' hopes up just because you want a strong, high quality link to your site. This brings me to the point of my post. Three of the results in Joe's screenshot for a search on "cialis" are from .edu domains, which is just ridiculous. The reason .edu and .gov domains give so much weighted link love is because they are thought to be trusted, authoritative domains, but the recent increase of gaming .edu sites for links is starting to make me suspect otherwise.

How is selling Cialis relevant to an .edu domain? I can understand if a university is doing a study on the drug, or some student has researched the drug for an essay, but clearly these results are no exception. They're blatantly spammy, and you would think (or hope) that the search engines have to be noticing this. Every now and then I see an SEO post pop up with "X Tips on How to Get .edu Links!", and while these posts are generally useful and white hat, it's frustrating to see poorly written, spamalicious results pop up so effortlessly and undermine white hat SEO attempts to score the holy grail of links.

Clearly, the search engines wouldn't ban an .edu domain, but wouldn't you think they'd have to start addressing these spam results somehow, maybe by adjusting the weight of .edu links? SEOmoz would become less of an authoritative SEO resource if we started writing posts about belly buttons and unicorns, and pretty soon we'd lose our audience to other tried and true SEO sites. I'm not saying this will happen to .edu sites any time soon, but it disappoints me to see an .edu result pop up for porn, pills, and casino searches.

I don't necessarily think that .edu links shouldn't have more link weight to them--I'm just wondering how sustainable their authority is. Clearly, the search engines are going to have to do a better job of weeding out the spam in order to keep .edu sites relevant and authoritative--if not, then look for viagra-cialis-penis-enlargement-a&m.edu to pop up sometime soon.

What do you think about spamming .edu sites? How can the search engines combat this effectively without sacrificing the weight of .edu links?