Buy All the .edu Links You Want

This is kind of a disgusting thing for a .edu site to do — but they’re doing it. From http://blogs.adison.edu/ (Google PageRank = 4) you can “donate” $35 a month get a WordPress blog hosted at their site. Here’s a quote from them:

Blogs are a $35 donation per month or $320 if you pay for your donation once a year ($100 Savings). This helps cover critical bandwidth, updates and support.

Wow, if I was a web host and made people pay $35 a month just to have a simple WordPress blog hosted, I’d never get a sale (BTW, you can get a free blog hosted a wordpress.com). Also, that “$100 Savings” sounds a little bit like a sales pitch to me. 😉

They all also have a resources directory (PageRank = 5), that you can buy a link for them to put on for $40 per year (better than the prices on text-link-ads):

To get into the resource directory a donation of $40 per year per link is required. This donation goes to reviewing your site and to making the site better for students.

Ohhhh, do the students get paid, too?

Bottom line, if .edu sites can get penalized, this one should be.

PS: I put rel=”nofollow” on the links to the .edu site.