Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
.com and .edu difference
-
Hello,
Can anyone tell me how big is the difference between a PR5 .com and a PR5 .edu
Double, triple? How big?
Cornel
-
I've been hearing this for years and it's always the same thing: Google likes .edu but not because it's .edu. EDU sites are typically major link bait in of themselves and they also don't link to other sites on a whim. As a result, they wind up with high site popularity and great link juice.
-
It would be very hard for anyone, other than those in the know at Google, to assign a value to this.
On the face of it, you would have to say that the .edu link would be more valuable considering what we know about Google assigning more value and trust to .edu sites but that's not to say all .edu links are way more valuable than a .com.
First, check both the .com and .edu in open site explorer to gain an indication of authority from SEOmoz's domain authority metric. You then have to assign your own value to the link in terms of relevance. Is the .com link more relevant to your site? If so, then it may actually be more valuable to you than the .edu link.
-
You know, Rand just spoke about this in a WBF recently but I can't seem to remember which one. He said that based on current research the connection between .EDU and authority in Google's eyes is based on content not a causation of the .EDU domain name. It's weight is determined by that site's content and links just like every other TLD.
Since PR has many different variables I would recommend taking the site as is and not trying to ascribe a certain authority based on PR or .edu domain name.
Run it through OSE and compare it to other similar sites then run some organic searches for keywords you know it is ranking for.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Possible to Migrate Website Design to Different Theme?
Last year we purchased a $79 them and coded a new designer our real estate website. The database of listings was transferred to the new theme. A year later we realize the new theme is not that fast; does not perform great, so despite optimizing our server we are not getting very fast performance. So, my question is, can we take the design, the CSS of our current theme (and database) and transfer it to a better performing theme? We are in a very competitive niche and our website must perform quickly both desktop and mobile. If this is feasible is this a major production? Note we are very happy with the design and this would solely be to improve download speeds to improve the user experience and get better ranking. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Meta-description issue in SERPs for different countries
I'm working with a US client on the SEO for their large ecommerce website, I'm working on it from the UK. We've now optimised several of the pages including updating the meta-descriptions etc. The problem is when I search on the keyword iin the UK I see the new updated version of the meta-description in SERPs results. BUT when my client searches on the same keyword in the US they're see the old version of the meta-description. Does any one have any idea why this is happening and how we can resolve it? Thanks Tanya
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TanyaKorteling0 -
Difference hummingbird and rankbrain
From my understanding hummingbird is the fact that google is able to parse sentences and link entites to understand the meaning of content in a better way than with just keywords and rankbrain is about user intent, google understands that they are various ways to mean the same thing. Is my understanding correct ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Substantial difference between Number of Indexed Pages and Sitemap Pages
Hey there, I am doing a website audit at the moment. I've notices substantial differences in the number of pages indexed (search console), the number of pages in the sitemap and the number I am getting when I crawl the page with screamingfrog (see below). Would those discrepancies concern you? The website and its rankings seems fine otherwise. Total indexed: 2,360 (Search Consule)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy
About 2,920 results (Google search "site:example.com")
Sitemap: 1,229 URLs
Screemingfrog Spider: 1,352 URLs Cheers,
Jochen0 -
Google crawling different content--ever ok?
Here are a couple of scenarios I'm encountering where Google will crawl different content than my users on initial visit to the site--and which I think should be ok. Of course, it is normally NOT ok, I'm here to find out if Google is flexible enough to allow these situations: 1. My mobile friendly site has users select a city, and then it displays the location options div which includes an explanation for why they may want to have the program use their gps location. The user must choose the gps, the entire city, or he can enter a zip code, or choose a suburb of the city, which then goes to the link chosen. OTOH it is programmed so that if it is a Google bot it doesn't get just a meaningless 'choose further' page, but rather the crawler sees the page of results for the entire city (as you would expect from the url), So basically the program defaults for the entire city results for google bot, but for for the user it first gives him the initial ability to choose gps. 2. A user comes to mysite.com/gps-loc/city/results The site, seeing the literal words 'gps-loc' in the url goes out and fetches the gps for his location and returns results dependent on his location. If Googlebot comes to that url then there is no way the program will return the same results because the program wouldn't be able to get the same long latitude as that user. So, what do you think? Are these scenarios a concern for getting penalized by Google? Thanks, Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Why would our server return a 301 status code when Googlebot visits from one IP, but a 200 from a different IP?
I have begun a daily process of analyzing a site's Web server log files and have noticed something that seems odd. There are several IP addresses from which Googlebot crawls that our server returns a 301 status code for every request, consistently, day after day. In nearly all cases, these are not URLs that should 301. When Googlebot visits from other IP addresses, the exact same pages are returned with a 200 status code. Is this normal? If so, why? If not, why not? I am concerned that our server returning an inaccurate status code is interfering with the site being effectively crawled as quickly and as often as it might be if this weren't happening. Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's
I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets 1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/ 2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/ The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down... .com/shop/wiget/color/shape/ The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc. Here are my questions. 1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer? 2. Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page? 3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page. I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying. As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets. Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SKP0 -
Submitting URLs multiple times in different sitemaps
We have a very dynamic site, with a large number of pages. We use a sitemap index file, that points to several smaller sitemap files. The question is: Would there be any issue if we include the same URL in multiple sitemap files? Scenario: URL1 appears on sitemap1. 2 weeks later, the page at URL1 changes and we'd like to update it on a sitemap. Would it be acceptable to add URL1 as an entry in sitemap2? Would there be any issues with the same URL appearing multiple times? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | msquare0