.EDU links have been a hot topic for a while now, but today we look at the big universities of the UK - thanks to the trusted links they have getting links from .ac.uk domains is a very desirable thing - for anyone inside AND outside the UK market.

Old school ranking methods

The British schools are quite often ranked in various publications, including that of the TIMES Online. Their ranking criteria were often the general education level, the budget of the school, the offered classes, general service quality of the university, the headcount of students vs. related to their lectors - and of course the general career perspectives you have after finishing that particular school
Well, while all that might be interesting for the general public, we focused on completely different ones, the SEO criteria. Read, how much do we want a link from that school!

Ranking for SEOs and link builders

We wanted to find out if the reputable British colleges that are known worldwide get the same amount of reputation from Google & co. That is, based on their ten thousands of strong and trusted back links.
In addition to that we were curious if we could find some hidden gems of link building of rather unknown schools that everyone might overlook because of their (non-)size but that would outperform other big schools in terms of trust and backlink power. Well to be frank, in fact I (Christoph that is) think that .ac.uk back links are way overlooked, given their strengths. Anyway, those smallish schools could be great targets for acquiring powerful links that nobody else is looking for.

How we did the valuation

To value the domains of all those universities, we scraped more than 20 different search related parameters, weighted them and let all that go into one overall ranking. Some of the parameters we included were obviously backlink counts from US schools (.edu links), schools from the UK (.ac.uk links), and of course governmental pages (.gov).
We also looked at the number of forward links of those domains, since every good and trusted site links out a lot naturally and is “not too greedy with it’s PR”. Other, not very useful parameters like Google Pagerank, the overall backlinks and also the very simply fakeable Alexa Rank were included.

Domain age is important - superimportant

One of the major criteria we further looked at was the domain inception date. After all the age of a domain is one of the major criteria in Google’s algo to gauge if and how much it should trust a site. The older the better.
The problem here was, that the Brits messed up their WHOIS registry some year ago, like so many other countries (Canada for instance) - so the domain creation date that you can find pretty reliable for .com domains is pretty naysaying for the .ac.uk - most of them returned some 2003 date… and one should agree that UK schools didn’t start publish their homepage five years ago.

Getting the real inception date - or closer at least

To get some useful out of this we additionally scraped the first archive.org date the homepage was found (which at least goes back to 1997) and in addition used Netcrafts tools to take the “first seen” date for the server - which often reported dates between 1993 and 1995 - which is another 10 years back.. Then we took the oldest date we found.
Actually we believe the Google boys started scraping the web earlier than 1998 and also bought some Yahoo data… so that’s some valuable difference here in our eyes.
So we scraped all that and more for over 600 ac.uk.-Domains and weighted those parameters based on their accuracy, scale and general importance for an SEO. Out of all that we got our overall SEO ranking.

For example if a domain has a lot of “normal” backlinks, the actual scale isn’t the same as for the .edu links - i.e. 50000 links might be a great value for .com backlinks, but for .gov backlinks it’s already quite HUGE to have 100 or more. You get the idea of different scales, do you?

Is the more the better?

In general we followed the idea of “more is better” when it came to link counts. The date was valued “older is better”.
We’re fully aware that quantity isn’t everything and that we could only do a rough approximation weighting the link counts. A better analysis (which would have required a lot of programming) would be to value the backlinks one by one, based on the backlinks to those pages and domains. But that’s a different story and out of scope for our study today. Let’s do that at a later point.
In the following table we compare our found SEO ranking to the one that the Times created

And the winner is …

SEO Rating	Url	Name	Type	Times Ranking	ARWU Ranking	QS Ranking	Webometrics Ranking	SEO Ranking
1	http://www.ox.ac.uk/	University of Oxford	University	1	10	4	42	1.1
2	http://www.cam.ac.uk/	University of Cambridge	University	2	4	3	28	1.1
3	http://www.ucl.ac.uk/	London’s Global University	University	6	22	7	68	1.2
4	http://www.ed.ac.uk/	University of Edinburgh	University	13	55	23	65	1.3
5	http://www.open.ac.uk/	The Open University	University					1.4
6	http://www.bham.ac.uk/	The University of Birmingham	University	20	91	75	220	1.5
7	http://www.leeds.ac.uk/	University of Leeds	University	34	101-151	104	180	1.5
8	http://www.bris.ac.uk/	University of Bristol	University	12	61	32	205	1.6
9	http://www.gla.ac.uk/	University of Glasgow	University	22	101-151	73	99	1.6
10	http://www.liv.ac.uk/	University of Liverpool	University	41	101-151	133		1.7
11	http://www.jisc.ac.uk/	Joint Information Systems Committee	Commitee					1.7
12	http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/	University of Warwick	University	5	152-200	69	142	1.7
13	http://www.lancs.ac.uk/	Lancaster Univsersity	University	24	201-302	170	255	1.8
14	http://www.ebi.ac.uk/	European Bioinformatics Institute	Institue					1.8
15	http://www.nhm.ac.uk/	Natural History Museum	Musem					1.8
16	http://www.kcl.ac.uk/	King’s College London	University	16	81	24		1.8
17	http://www.york.ac.uk/	University of York	University	7	201-302	81	219	1.8
18	http://www.lboro.ac.uk/	Loughborough University	University	10		230		1.8
19	http://www.intute.ac.uk/	Institute	Institute					1.8
20	http://www.hw.ac.uk/	Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh	University	46	55	23		1.9
21	http://www.bristol.ac.uk/	University of Bristol	University	12	61	32	205	2.1
22	http://www.abdn.ac.uk/	University of Aberdeen	University	34	201-302	153		1.9
23	http://www.le.ac.uk/	University of Leicester	University	29	152-200	177		1.9
24	http://www.qub.ac.uk/	Queen’s University Belfast	University	33	201-302	202		2.0
25	http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/	University of Cardiff	University	21	101-151	133		2.0
26	http://www.essex.ac.uk/	University of Essex	University	27	303-401	258		1.9
27	http://www.mmu.ac.uk/	Manchester Metropolitan University	University	73	40	29	82	2.1
28	http://www.dundee.ac.uk/	University of Dundee	University	29	201-302	213		2.1
29	http://www.strath.ac.uk/	University of Strathclyde Glasglow	University	37	101-151	270	99	2.1
30	http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/	University of St. Andrews	University	9	201-302	83		2.1

Source: CEMPER.COM - own research and valuation based on more than 20 detail search engine parameters and their actual values for the domains in October 2008

Our interpretation - feel free to add yours

Well, you would have expected that Oxford and Cambridge got their top ranks. Those are big brands and among the top 3 .ac.uk schools - also in the offical Time rankings.

But then it gets exciting!
The 3rd top 3 school - Imperial College can be seen nowhere.

The London Global University as well known as UCL (University College London) is a popular university but it is the 3rd strongest domain SEO-wise followed bei Edinburgh. The online university Open University doesn’t even appear in the Times ranking (this one seems to be more popular here in Austria than in the UK).
Simply looking at the first then ranks shows a strong discrepancy between the official ranking and our SEO-Ranking. The Lancaster university is almost double as strong as it’s Time rank would make you believe and Nottingham or St. Andrews loose completely against their competitors. Leeds on the other hand boosts up to number 7 from an official 34.

We think what we see here is an indicator of the online affinity of the particular school. What’s big offline doesn’t have to be big (or successful) online.
With a lot of publications and the links to them (and out of them such a small school can be far ahead in the online world.
The Open University for instance is a great example as pure online school - and obviously is cited by other academic resources a LOT more often than then Bristol.

Interesting, no?

What we also learnt was that not everything labeled .ac.uk is in fact a university. Suddenly those top rankings list sites like the Natural History Museum or the european bioinformatics institute. Those aren’t schools, but stil got a strong academic background and organization, which would justify the .ac.uk domain - for some. If the job portal http://www.prospects.ac.uk/ (#49 FYI) deserves an .ac.uk domain extension just because it’s a job board for students is questionable at least.

Hard work for a couple numbers - as usual

Gathering and shuffling the base data around for this took quite a while for us - all done by hand and Excel. I hear you ask that we should provide all that base data to the public in our “spreadsheet of hell” - and we might do so if we get the feedback, but that was way too much for this post.
Much more of interest should be that you now got a nice list of british schools whose domains will pass wonderful juicy trust to your site - if you get a link from them. That could be your link hunting shortlist.

What to do with this list

This SEO-Ranking also gives you a priority and distribution of time budget allocation to plan for. Going after the Cranfield school (#50) with a general grade of 2.4 is by far less promising than going after the two top ones Oxford or Cambridge.

Outlook for .edu vs. ac.uk domain trust research

With this valuation model we layed the groundwork for more valuations for different groups of domains and industries. We think it will get really exciting to proceed now by comparing these results to

• canadian schools (anybody got a great list of domains for those?)
• the US .edu domains
• the german universities
• and finally compare all those types of schools to each other
• One little preview Oxford or Cambridge really outperform A LOT US universities with their domain strength and trust. Further details is still being worked on.

Using this model for loans, credit cards and insurance

Of course we could use the same method value any number of different domains active in an industry - be it financial servers or real estate - you name it. Of course we can build a slightly different weighting for all those parameters - just as Google does set different standard for what’s good and what’s too much for each industry!

We could also compare those results to interesting indicators like the number of organic rankings in the Top30 result pages for millions of keywords - and tune our own benchmark against that. This wasn’t possible with the UK schools right now, since schools have so different amount of content published online, that this was pretty worthless data.

This should be different for the typical commercial sites from the finance or insurance sector. They are all more or less competing for the same stuff, and so will their content (and number of rankings) be comparable.

Oh well, maybe we’ll even crack the secret Google-Algorithm one day? who knows?

Should we provide a list of of all the base data for this reasearch to the public? This would probably be an Excel sheet with another couple 1000s of words explanations. Please let us know in the comments!

Bonus Tip for great authority links

This is an update to the post - with some great idea on how to further use this list of authority ac.uk sites. If you go an put this list into a common forward link tool like our own private tool you will immediately get a second shortlist of sites to target for link building. After all it can be very tedious and expensive to get links from .ac.uk sites (just like with the .edu sites).

But looking at the commonly linked out sites of those top universities could reveal a nice list of overlooked, possibly important sites in the academic world that might not appeal to be so nicely designed as others. But you will probably LOVE their backlinks and domain trust.

01/26/2009 Update: Old School Ranking Methodes

Due to our research on Universities in Germany and Canada we found two other very reliable rankings.

The Academic Ranking of Wolds Universities (ARWU) is a ranking published by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This ranking is quote by the online magazine: RP-Online, Online-Newspaper for business sciences: WIWI and by the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Quacquarelli Symonds Limited as well published a ranking the QS World University Ranking. To this ranking you will find links from the Australian University of Queensland or from The University of Amsterdam.

05/25/2009 Update: Old School Ranking Methodes

We found another old school ranking source which one we used to extend our table.

The dater is taken from “Webometrics Ranking of World Universities” which is a published twice a year since 2004. This ranking is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). Cybermetrics Lab is a research group of the largest research body in Spain.

Should we do the job for you and present a common forward link report for those TOP 30 ac.uk sites? Please let us know in the comments!

What do you think?

Let us know in the comments please!