Marketing on an .edu domain
Slashdot and others are reporting that the “Pickering Institute” have begun working with a marketing agency, LinkAdage, to offer people the ability create blogs on their .edu domain. Not students or faculty, though honestly in looking the pi.edu website I doubt they have either, but anyone who wants to fork out the money to do so. Want a blog on an .edu site? They want $50 a month for the privilege.
So, what’s the big deal? The deal is that search engines are trained to treat information scraped from educational sites as having more authority or importance compared to a regular old .com website. Now, people are trying to game the system.
Here’s why at a real college or university, this would be bad. First, it goes against the educational mission of our institutions. We’re not in the business of marketing other companies. Second, it becomes a resource issue. As these types of sites will generate additional traffic, both good and bad, that will take away resources from legitimate academic uses. Third, I wonder if Google gets wise to this, and trust me, they will, I wonder how your institution’s rankings will be affected.
In the end, this is bad. Here’s hoping Educause sees this and revokes their domain. I also hope they remain vigilant when it comes to making sure this does not become a trend.
Seth has a good take on this.
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Allowing people to create commercial pages or promote commercial sites through .edu domains would soon make the value of .edu’s diminish …. !