Are .EDU.MS domains considered legitimate by search engines?

[ytodoeso]

I've read that it's very good to have links to your site from .EDU sites, to have a better PageRank, but I also understand that it's not too easy to get good links from those educational sites...

well, today I found that the (dot)EDU(dot)MS domain names are available for free, (I obviously created an account), in Google I found some sites that seem to belong to legitimate educational institutions, but I'm not sure if Google does treat (dot)EDU(dot)MS domains as valid .EDU sites...

a free account allows you to have 100 different "projects" (unique websites), and each project can have up to 5 different (dot)EDU(dot)MS subdomains (all pointing to the same content), it looks nice (although the ads on the free sites are too intrusive)

has anybody built links from one of those free (dot)EDU(dot)MS sites? was it good for your PR?

 

[theSun]

If it is not verisign registry approved extension, then no. it is not. thats how I interpret it.

 

[Eric Lyon]

I checked out the main site where you can get the free Edu.Ms domains and then I started running a few different search queries in google to see if I could get anything to popup. The fact that the main site pops ups for edu.ms is the first sign that google does recognize it. Further searching for like Design.Edu.Ms also showed a result for a site on that domain in the google index. If google didn't count domains using this second level as websites it wouldn't display results in the index for them.

With the above said, while google does count edu.ms as legitimate websites and indexes them, I have doubts that they get the same value as top level .Edu sites. While there's no data to support most theories when it comes to extension value comparisons, it is important to know that one can pretty much rank a site in any extension on Page 1 of the google index if it meets the requirements of googles webmaster quality control. Basicaly covering value points such as but not limited to: Quality / Unique content, Keyword Vs. Content density, Keyword title relevance, H1 / H2 / H3 tags, URL keyword relevance, Anchored keyword backlink relevance, Deep Linking of pages, Easy Navigation, Page Load Times, Geo IP country match for regional data-center results, and many more values in addition to these.

As far as what each value is, Only google knows the exact numbers and keeps it a trade secret to help prevent extreme manipulation tactics from slipping through the algorithm.

Not sure if that helps with your question much, but that's my thoughts on the topic.

Eric Lyon

 

[m-i-k-e]

No, Google won't give the same credit to links coming from a site built on an edu.ms site as they would on a .edu site.

Links from .edu sites score well because of the exclusivity of the extension and the legitimacy of the sites operating on .edu

.edu.ms isn't related to the .edu extension at all. If you have something like college.edu.ms all you have is a subdomain of a ccTLD, .ms is the true extension here, not .edu