URL forwarding and search engines

Hello all

I work at a university and am setting up staff pages for all our academics. I would like to set up custom domains for each academic (eg johnsmith.com) that would simply act as a pointer to a sub page of our university site (eg myuni.edu.au/staff/johnsmith/). My plan is to setup URL forwarding through the domain registrar as no hosting space is required.

Now, I have heard that search engines give high rankings to URLs with .edu in the domain and I was wondering of setting up these domain names could have any adverse effect on the ranking of a staff member's personal page. The custom domain would be used on business card and also through links from other sites, but I would imagine that once google (for example) has followed the link and scanned the content, it would see its hosted on a .edu domain and would therefore give it the preferential ranking that it would if the full URL was used in the link - is that correct?

Any tips, hints, tricks would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance

That's a myth

OK thanks for the reply. So do search engines have any issues with domains that are simply pointers or does it make no difference at all to the rank the actual page receives?

Thanks again

They won't have an issue. But I think the domain they will list will be the actual hosted domain and not the redirected domain.

That seems logical and won't be a problem

Thanks again for your help