I just wrote a post up @ http://www.dewittsmedia.com/seo-blogs/link-building/are-edu-and-gov-links-a-waste-of-money/ to give you guys some insight on .EDU Links and .GOV links well from my personal opinion anyways.
Matt Cutts mentioned long back that they dont give importance to any tlds. A .gov is no better than a .com, if both of them have same kind of page rank and importance. Those .gov sites that sell links are probably worth nothing!
Exactly! The domain extension has nothing to do with it, you can get .com links that will blow the .edu out of this world.
Don't listen to Matt Cutts cuz he will never tell you how to rank on Google. .Gov and .Edu links are Authority links..so they will Definitely help you rank better. The key is finding them that offer no follow. Also you must keep them pointing to you for atleast 3 months + before you can expect to see their significance. IMO Matt Cutts is a good guy, but to rely on his SEO, I would have to think twice!
Do you really thingk Matt Cutts is going to give you the exact details on how to rank for search engine rankings? Ok buddy.
.gov and .edu's tend to be authority sites, so any quality link on an authority site is good - but the vast majority these edu & gov links are on orphan or student pages or forum pages which will carry very little or no weight and are probably a waste of money.
I used to think .edu and .gov were the shit.. Until recently I beat out a .gov site for one of my main serps.. Something I thought I wouldn't be able to do.. Now I'd have to agree with the above info and Matt Cutts, and say that .edu and .gov do not matter anymore than anything else. You can see if you do a google search for "congress blog" I'm the one above loc.gov
Trust me when I tell you that this reason is cuz ur in niche what doesnt have any authority for that keyword. Meaning your keyword is worth nothing, and is hardly searched, and is not relevant to any content. That makes your Authority concept of the .gov next to nill. Try searching for Ontario Highway Traffic Act #2 is www.ontariohighwaytrafficact.com Now there is Authority. Learn from that. If this site still cant beat the gov site...then think why? I can tell you for sure its not about rankings. Its because of Authority. This site will NEVER beat that site because in that niche the .gov site has the most Authority.
So, I guess content really is king then? With my intent for the blog originally it didn't matter about traffic amount (just PR for selling backlinks).. But seeing how the world is going now, I recently started trying to build real traffic to it.
It's hard to draw conclusions on non-competitive keywords. It appears that only 2 people a day search for it on google. http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php
Oh c'mon! He has all the reasons. He has no reasons to give you true info - He's Google representative, aims for SERP relevancy, and I would be surprised if he gave us tips how to cheat on Google and manipulate their natural SERPs. Google for sure pays him good money and these money are paid to make SERPs as natural as possible. Saying this metaphorically - You don't expect pirates to stick on their treasure maps on every corner As for .EDU and .GOV links they could be more valuable than .COM ones, they're for sure more valuable in terms of PR. But I would rather go for related content links if we're talking about difficult-to-obtain links and... loads of crappy links. The thing is that in my opinion even in 2008 loads (1k, 10k) of cheesy links are more valuable than few quality links. Regards, PS
For the most part, linking up to articles is a waste of time unless done with some tact and taste. It would do more for the site linked too if a brief summery of the article was given in the post and proper linking followed (like with anchor text). I'm on dialup, so I don't generally bother clicking into links without something a bit more substantial then "oh oh I wrote sumting!" though even when I was on highspeed I generally didn't follow links unless I had a reason, and as it stands, this is simply no reason. My opinion is even supported by the rules here at DP: As posting some content with the link helps the link itself by generating more traffic to click through it, and offers up some content for the forum you are posting it on (in this case DP). It will also help promote the discussion within the thread helping it to stay on top (which can in turn generate addition traffic and site recognition). *shrug*
Yea, but either way if your busy you still have to pay someone to take care of content or consulting fees. For example a lot of our clients are CEO's and etc they always have to hire someone to expand different areas rather its investing into links or hiring a content writer that can acquire them links naturally through content.