.edu links have been a buzzworthy topic for years now, thanks to the trust and authority those domains have. This led us to compare take a look at the often overlooked British universities which are also super strong authority domains in our eyes, so getting a link from an .ac.uk domains is a very desirable thing – for anyone inside AND outside the UK market.
Now it’s been a while since and as we promised, we’ll look at other countries’ university domains and – as we found to be worthwhile – authority domains in general. Today we’ll continue our research thread with Canadian universities

just to follow up with the domain strength of German universities very soon!

Domain Ranking for SEOs and link builders

Just as with the British universities, we wanted to find out if the reputable Canadian schools that are known worldwide get the same amount of trust and reputation from Google & co.
We also were curious again if we could find some hidden gems of link building of rather unknown schools that everyone might overlook because of their (non-)size (in real world) but that would outperform other big schools in terms of trust, authority and backlink power.

A new set of tools and methods

Back in October/November 2008 we did already spend considerable time on researching good sources for lists of schools, dozens of SEO parameters for each of the 100s of domains and then weighting and comparing them.
Well, that was an easy job back then!

The goal to research Canadian and German universities was a bit tougher…

More work for .CA vs. AC.UK universities

Official University Rankings

the TIMES has a pretty popular ranking of UK schools, but now we needed a good, reputable source for Canada and Germany’s school… plus – we were eager to compare those schools to each other… just as we do SEO wise.

FOUND THAT – with ARWU and THE-QS rankings (read below for more)

A Canadian school domain list

Funny, it cost us some time just to FIND a list of Canadian and German universities – including their webpage!

FOUND THAT!

National Academic Backlink Power metric involved coding = $$$

National what?
Sounds too fancy? It’s about the links from other universities in the same country!



The national academic backlink power is measured in the quantity of backlinks from universities in the same nation. We believe that a school is stronger if there’s a lot of content and material published on it’s domain and in addition linked to from other universities.

If there wouldn’t be the TLD issue!

So this job was a piece of cake job for the UK research, because all we had to do was ask Yahoo how many .ac.uk backlinks they found for a specific domain (and we had that automated already)…

See, it works like this query "linkdomain:http://www.ox.ac.uk/ site:ac.uk" and whoppa – Oxford has 422k backlinks from other British schools

However, for Canada (and Germany) there’s nothing ready like that. This is because Canadian and German universities don’t have a separate domain extension (TLD) like .edu for the US or .ac.uk for the UK.

So if you ask simply Yahoo for backlinks to a Canadian university from other Canadian university and try it like this "linkdomain:utoronto.ca site:.ca" all you know is that there are roughly 800k backlinks from Canadian domains overall – not restricted to Canadian universities.

SOLVED THAT

we CAN count the number of backlinks from Canadian or German schools now – for ANY domain we’d like to this is a GEM! we will blog about that authority backlink counter, but just to tell you, it involved coding, and long runtimes

good thing is – we found some more nice tricks to get more links than we ever expected – high quality, high detail backlink data – beyond any 1000 link limit.

And we also have some interesting findings regarding one school’s website that has duplicate domains, duplicate content and what trust seems to be able to help nevertheless. Read about that soon

Comparable SEO rankings between .CA / .DE / .AC.UK domains

Our goal was to compare Canadian universities to German ones to the UK ones…

SOLVED THAT!

Please note, that we ALWAYS measure a universities strength based on the number of national academic backlinks, AND .edu AND .gov links, since we imply that the US .edus and .govs provide strength and trust to ANY country’s site.

This means that the results could be a bit skewed towards English language universities. This appears to be based on a sort of two-world system in the academic world. You hardly find English language papers quote German language papers. Vice versa is a little bit better tough – a little bit!

How we did the valuation

From a basis of roughly 200 Canadian 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

• other canadian universites (.ca links from special list of domains – see above)
• backlink counts from US schools (.edu links)
• governmental pages (.gov)
• domain age, measure in various way
• forward links
• yes, we also took the number of forward links of those domains into account, since every good and trusted site links out a lot naturally and is "not too greedy with it’s links".
• we also included parameters like Google Pagerank (which is pretty pointless), the overall backlinks we counted and traffic metrics of Alexa (which can be manipulated quite easily, is said to be skewed towards SEOs) or the Compete.com Rank (which didn’t even give us results for all domains, so we took it out again.

Domain age is important – but…

Again, one of the major criteria looked at was the domain inception date. The age of a domain is one of the major criteria in Google’s algorithm to check if and how much it could possibly trust a site. Usually it’s the older the better.
Once again we found that Canada cough migrated their WHOIS registry several times in the years 1995, 2000, 2001 and 2003, like so many other countries (UK for instance). this means that the domain creation date that you find to be pretty reliable for .com domains is pretty useless for the university .ca domains registered – most of them returned dates like 08/01/1995 or 1/1/1996 … the picture looks better than with the ac.uk domains, but nevertheless we uses the same method to gauge the real inception of a domain, as explained earlier in the post about .ac.uk domains.

Is the more the better?

In general we followed the idea of "more is better" when it came to link counts. This isn’t perfect – and as explained here, we have ideas how to improve that.
The date was valued as "older is better" – obviously.

And the winner is….

In the following table we compare our SEO ranking to those of the two new academic ratings ARWU and THE-QS.
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As you can see – University of Toronto has a .edu domain as well – and we’ll talk about that soon more in detail.
Westervelt college decided to redirect it’s nice domain http://westerveltcollege.com/ to the free-hostish looking http://westervelt.x2idea.net/ … well – not sure what’s going on in their brand department… and biggest fun of all is, the root domain http://www.x2idea.net/ runs a default Debian linux start page… frightening… would you want to study there?

Oh – and it’s a 302 redirect

Even more hard work for a couple numbers

Once again we’ve been gathering and shuffling the base data that was "easy" to get. Just as for the ac.uk research we did.
However this time it got harder – we needed to implement special back link checking tools to find the actual number of universities linking to a site – with a seed list of universities to check against.

But great thing is – it forced us to find and implement some more nice tricks to get more links than we ever expected to get from public sources – high quality, high detail backlink data and way beyond any 1000 link limit!

What to do with this list

This SEO-Ranking gives you a priority and idea about allocation of time budget to plan for when hunting for links. Going after the UPEI.CA school (#30) with a general grade of 2.6 is by far less promising than going after the top one University of Toronto.

How to compare to other university domains

As promised earlier, we’ll try to make the valuation model comparable and therefore started to publish our "SEO Rating" number – which in general is a number between 1 and 5 – comparable to European school grades and a weighted mixture of detail grades for different aspects we looked at.
From today on, those SEO Ratings can be compared between countries. We will update the post about the .ac.uk universities in a few hours to hold the new official rankings from ARWU as well as THE-QS.

We think this will become even more exciting as we’ll launch the research for German universities in a few days.

Using this model for non-academic domains

What develops further is our domain group valuation model, where we’re able to look at a whole range of domains of an industry to rank them SEO-wise – be it from the financial, real estate or tech sector doesn’t matter.
We’re going to continue our research and preparations.

Bonus Tip for finding great authority links

Another great approach to use this list is to use it as input for a common forward link tool like our own private tool. This will result in a list of domains that are commonly linked from these authorities – and will result in a second shortlist of sites to target for link building.
After all it can be very tedious and expensive to get links from Canadian university sites (well, this is true for .ac.uk or .edu sites also)!

Update 05/26/2009

After updating our table with the new finding from another traditional university ranking we got finally some data for some universities that we did not find on any of the typical ranking before.

The ranking was accomplished by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC). It is called the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities and it is published twice a year since 2004.

Do you want this research for GERMAN domains? Let us know!