John Mueller from Google said it is wrong to say that “Edu domains tend to have a ton of outbound links, and as such, Google ignores a big chunk of them.” He said “People who focus on .edu links usually have bigger problems to worry about, but I’ve certainly never said what you’re suggesting.” In short, John is saying Google does not by default ignore all EDU links.

Here are those tweets:

I think this misconception is mine – I covered back in 2018 that Google tends to ignore a lot of edu links because there are a ton of paid and spammy ones. It was based on this tweet from John in 2018:

I showed that to John and he responded:

In any event, yes, Google ignores spammy links when it knows they are spammy. But it is not specific to EDU links. EDU links may be more spammy, I don’t know. But It is not about the TLD but rather how the link is earned.

Forum discussion at Twitter.