We occasionally have a request from a client to put their pages on sites without a tilde, or that little squiggle from the Spanish language.  We have found that to be a myth regarding links – some of our strongest sites do have a tilde in the URL.  We have seen clients move up in search with just these pages, regardless of the tilde.  Also, if you too have this question, you can know that the large SEO companies that buy repeatedly from us do not worry about the tilde. If you have been link building for a long time, you will have already noticed that it does not matter.

The value is that the page is full of content, much harder to obtain links in content, and that it does reside on an .edu, that seems to be pleasing the search engines.