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John Mueller from Google said it is wrong to say that "Edu domains tend to have a ton of outbound links, and as such, Google ignores a big chunk of them." He said "People who focus on .edu links usually have bigger problems to worry about, but I've certainly never said what you're suggesting." In short, John is saying Google does not by default ignore all EDU links.
Here are those tweets:
People who focus on .edu links usually have bigger problems to worry about, but I've certainly never said what you're suggesting.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 14, 2021
I think this misconception is mine - I covered back in 2018 that Google tends to ignore a lot of edu links because there are a ton of paid and spammy ones. It was based on this tweet from John in 2018:
Because of the misconception that .edu links are more valuable, these sites get link-spammed quite a bit, and because of that, we ignore a ton of the links on those sites. Ideally, they should just nofollow all of those links instead of us having to ignore them.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 3, 2018
I showed that to John and he responded:
Wait, does that mean schools are irrelevant?
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 14, 2021
:-)
In any event, yes, Google ignores spammy links when it knows they are spammy. But it is not specific to EDU links. EDU links may be more spammy, I don't know. But It is not about the TLD but rather how the link is earned.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
