Amazing Response to a TLD (Score 1, Interesting)

Wow, it seems like I grabbed everyone's attention and stirred up a hornet's nest. I haven't had a project receive this much Buzz and hate mail since I started LinkAdage Auctions in 2003.

It's no secret that WWW.PI.EDU not a major university - no surprise there. However, they do have an online certification program. Before I came involved, PI.edu spoke with SEOs and link brokers who advised them to sell links and basically become a paid link farm to monetize the site.

Sure they would make money in the short run selling links, but creating a huge blog community offers them a much greater opportunity to capture a large web presence and traffic. Also, paid blogs are not against any of the search engine terms of service - no matter what the TLD.

With the blog community PI can achieve the high standards of an edu while at the same time improving their core product with revenues earned. Whether you agree or not with online certification programs, this is a different issue.

What I am helping PI.edu do is create a blog community with a strong educational slant. Our TOS requires us to be very strict as to the quality of our member blogs - and yes, the TOS will be enforced. Since we are charging very little per blog, it is not a big deal for us to refund and delete a garbage/link spam type blogs.

Blogs.pi.edu just launched yesterday and there was an unexpected surge in blog sign ups. Thus we have not filtered many blogs out yet. Also, many people bought sub-domain place holders and have not posted yet so we cannot make a judgment on quality of many blogs. Rest assured, blogs that are not up to standard will be given a warning, and deleted and refunded if they do not meet our TOS.

There are many paid blog communities out there; the only difference is our bloggers will have an EDU after their domain and all blogs will need to meet certain quality requirements. The grand plan is to build the blog community into a high traffic blog community - the fact that it is an EDU will help speed the process. But first we are taking baby steps and hopefully people will not continue to pass judgment based on a TDL or before we get a chance to get the site of the ground.

I also hope that the search engines will judge and rank each blog and the PI.EDU blog community on the quality of content rather than the fact that the domain TLD is EDU. Believe me, if I didnâ(TM)t do this project, someone else would be turning this site into an under the radar EDU link farm.

People are being naive if they don't know that many of the top universities have 100% commercial blogs and blog posts for sale by students and faculty alike. Many major universities also have entire sections of their domain for sale to those willing to pay the price. I guess they are under the radar because their size and the search engines have trouble sorting the wheat from the chafe. From what I seen, people that own these underground EDU pages seem to be getting a nice rankings boost.

The Blog.PI.EDU difference is that we are creating an open blog network, we have higher standards, and we are in plain view for all to see and grow. Sure, we may have some growing pains, and will not be perfect but what website is?