Just curious - where do you see the JS redirects? I'm seeing server-side redirects, but the interesting thing is that the return a 200 (not a 301 or 302), which could suggest they pass link-juice.

My gut sense is that Miriam's right - they probably mask direct link-juice but are still very valuable as a citation, especially for local search.

The large-scale correlation data we've run shows no inherent advantage of the .edu TLD in recent years. I suspect this is in part because those links have been heavily gamed. A reputable institution does carry solid domain authority and trust, no doubt, but I don't think that the extension itself is a strong ranking signal. Would I rather have a link from Harvard than Bob's Bait Shop? Sure, but it depends a lot on where that link is, how deep the page is, if it's indexed, what the context is, etc.

I appreciate your transparency, but to me that looks like low-quality article spinning. It's ok to a point, and it may get you a short term boost, but those pages are going to be devalued over time. Plus, they have no other value (those links won't drive traffic).

As for the argument that Google can do whatever they want so that makes anything ok, I strongly disagree. There are link-building tactics that can create long-term problems. Should a client risk a full-on penalty for a low-quality link-building tactic that might get them a 5% boost for 3 months? For me to suggest that as an SEO would be grossly irresponsible. There are smart risks and there are bad risks.

Rand has a great post on link valuation:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

There's no magic to .edu links, frankly - the data over the past couple of years doesn't really support that they're inherently better than .com's, etc. It's true that many .edu sites are high-authority sites, of course, but that's just a correlation (it's not that Google prefers .edu or .gov inherently).

Within any site, though, you have to look at the Page Authority, the number of links on that page, the placement of the links, the anchor text, the relevance (to some degree), and a lot of other factors. Let's take a non-edu example - DMOZ. People kill themselves for DMOZ links, but lately I'm seeing DMOZ listings where the entire page isn't indexed because it's so deep. No indexation means ZERO link juice. So, even though it's DMOZ, the link is worthless.