I have alway preferred good use of on page SEO and the good careful use of italics and bold emphasis elements on page rather than going after things like .edu or .gov links. But did you know there is nothing at Google, other than perhaps an ever diminishing PR factor, that gives such links any "trust" or "special" standing above any other site? Take a read here Now when you see all those scraper or stats sites showing all those .Gov and .Edu links marked separately as though they are something special you know you can smile to yourself and think "my if only they knew this means nothing in particular". And that's the old hat news that is old hat news which still holds true today. To disagree and/or debate go below >
He blows it in the last little bit though. Are the "reputable" people given that status because of their inbound links or some other measure? I imagine there are thousands of .edu web admins who would love the world to know that links from their sites are worth diddly squat and they might be able to get some control over the spam.
If my memory serves me correctly Sarah it's just such slip ups as the "reputable" mention that has mainly caused the problem IMHO. I believe that transcript I linked is the main reason this pursuit of .edu and .gov links went the way it did. I had never really thought about the poor .edu and .gov sites having to deal with all the onslaught this misaprehension has caused them. Though I don't sell anti spam software or had reason to think about it as have only ever commented on one Gov blog ever in regard to their problem not ranking for enough terms to out rank sites giving out info which was out of date or wrong.
I didn't pick up on the date I've just cleared out 3000 failed event registrations from a site that had been spammed. The poor event organiser was anxious that the system wasn't working because 3000 people had failed to register successfully. Those .edu admins have it so, so much worse.
Yeah I feel for them. Must be very tedious. Some of the the UK gov sites use WP and also have Jetpak so I imagine they likely use Askimet to. I think perhaps the reason for the "reputable" thing is partly to do with the domain registration process of needing to verify credentials. Other things "reputable" include to some extent TM's and even length of domain registration I believe had bearing on these factors at times. A combination of TM and ten year registered domain name I believe if my memosry serves me correctly all had/or have bearing. There are other domain ext's that also have the same verification process which makes them "authoritive" as I am sure you know. There are of course other factors to. I am always learning new things so am always interested in what why and how. However the places sending the most useful info linking wise back and forth with each other logic says will be .edu as it is in the spirit of Tim Berners Lee and the old Intranet idea of what hypertext links we're developed for, so they are bound to be the most targeted with Google's system of PR due to the very nature of things and how they work online.