Some recent Google shifts have caused a lot of .edu websites to rank for competitive keywords like mortgage and credit card. Here is a screenshot of the top 100 search results for “mortgage” with 57 .edu results and 15 .gov results. And here is a similar credit card screenshot.

Note that few of these pages have any relevant on-page content. Is this a case of Google-bombing? Or did Google dial up the .edu bonus too far?

Does Google want to return all the irrelevant pages? Or does it not matter if they are deep enough in the result set? Will having mystery meat results on pages 2 through 100 hurt Google’s brand? Or does everyone just click on the first page?

We discussed this a bit more in the forums: new Google results

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