Alison University seems to have taken advantage of the perception that .edu links are worth a fair bit of $$$.

You’ll often notice that .edu sites have pretty good PR because they’re seen to be “more trusted” with Google.

Alison offers a blog at her .edu for $35 a month or $320 a year.

Not recommended.

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December 27th, 2007 | Backlinks, PR, SEO | No comments

So it looks like Google’s at it again, being hypocritical & selling its high PR page for $10k.

This is interesting given that Matt Cutts hates paid links

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good
opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how
to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If
you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable
disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t
affect search engines. … I wanted to give a heads-up because Google
is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.

Further, on Google’s Checkout, they’re profiling their own clients on their PR8 site. Here’s the quote:

In addition, Google Checkout helps make it even easier for consumers to find us when they search for items like Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls by displaying the Google Checkout badge next to our search results.

I’m sure Titleist would be pleased with that! That’s got to be worth well over $1,000 in value!

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December 27th, 2007 | Backlinks, Google, PR, SEO | No comments