Does anyone know if Google has officially said anywhere the a back link from a dot gov domain is regarded as more highly regarded than a standard dot com? If there's an article or anything from an authoritative source could you please post it here? I've been looking but without luck. I've just spent some quality time scouring matt cutts' blog as well any help is appreciated. cheers
I haven't listen any official words from Google or any organization or from any author that .gov links are more Google lover. But they are considered little beneficial but i think not in rankings but to gain trust factor from Google. Because as u know gov sites are more reputable big sites have gud and unique content with lots of backlinks. From my point of view a new gov sites is like all other extension sites. And a popular .gov site and other extensions sites are same if they never apply any black hat technique.............. SO don't get confuse and concentrate on your work............ I watched a video few days ago in which matt cutts clearly said that there is no difference between gov and other extensions links. I am trying to find out that video for u.......
Has any law firm officially ever said that a student from Harvard, Princeton, Oxford or Camebridge will be more highly regarded by them than somebody from a standard university? The point is that .gov and .edu domains are impossible for any tom, dick and harry to register just to improve their web sites ranking. University web sites and government web sites are managed by people who are deemed the most altruistic of our societies, these are "not for profits" that will not usually link to any old site without very good reason, relevance or desire to contribute to the "greater good". Google and other search engines know that when a .gov or .edu links to a web site, then there is a very strong probability that this web site is going to be relevant to the greater population as a whole. The site MUST have something of interest to the people who will lead or world tomorrow (students) and those who are leading it today (government workers) as well as the general public. So no, it may not be writtenin stone by Google, but the implications are there by the fact that these organisations often carry huge PageRank weight.
Good point, but there is also a lot of discussion, in other parts of the web, that because of the high amounts of spam links, esp. edu, that they are not as valued. So, if you go that route make sure your links are as legit as possible!