Easy Ranking on Trusted Sites

Scoring links from a .edu web site is a fairly well known link building technique. Google tends to place a lot of trust on .edu sites and finding a way to harness that trust is nothing new in the game of search engine optimization. It's with that thought in mind that Badi Jones of SEOlogs points out .edu sites that are dominating the rankings for viagra related terms.

Jones shows a graphic of the top ten listings at Google for the term "buy viagra". Eight of the top ten listings are from .edu sites. (Nine of the top ten were .edu sites when I checked just now.)

Things are a lot different for .EDU sites. Google just seems to trust them for just about anything. Their reasoning is probably that since only school can register a .edu site, it is less likely to be spam.

I experienced this myself back when I was a guide at About.com. Since About had been established as such a strong authority site, ranking pages was pretty much as simple as throwing the keyword in the title tag, the headline and a few spots within the article. In fact, I wrote an article about all the people search for the Paris Hilton sex video when the story broke and was surprised to find that the article ranked #1 on Google for "Paris Hilton sex video" for more than a month.

With that in mind, it doesn't surprise me to find out that enterprising college students are taking advantage of those .edu domains to make a little spending money.

The question becomes, why is Google not yet finding a way to fix this?

I just ran a search for "buy viagra" myself and was astounded to see that this page is actually clearing Google's filters. In fact, many of the top ten listings are still being ranked based on Google's cached data of similar spammy pages. Some now redirect to new sites or simply contain zero data.

Maybe Google needs to stop worrying about getting everyone to rat out the sites that use paid links and start focusing on fixing the problems they already have?