I have heard about .gov and .edu links, is there any extra weight for these links?

Actually I heard about .gov and .edu do-follow links I would like to know whether they are contributing more value than .com links. Looking forward for the reply from SEO experts.

 

Yes of course. If you get backlinks from those edu sites it is worthwhile compared to .com sites. These are educational and government sites so Google trust them a lot compared to .com sites.

 

yes i agree with sakthi these sites are trusted domains from the search engine point of view

 

From my experience .gov and .edu give a big weighting

 

Of course Google will trust these domains. They will be benificial for you.

 

.gov and .edu are trusted domain, so Google weightage this type of domain.

 

Nope. There is no extra weightage. Key is if you are getting link from trusted site either its .com or .gov there is no difference. However most of .gov and .edu are considered to be trusted site and a majority of .com are non trusted and non authority, hence there is a common misconception that G gives more weightage to .gov and .edu

 

KIm, I (and I think some of the others in this thread) am under the impression that the .edu, .gov and .org domains actually give more weight than .com.

 

The domain extension itself does not make it more important. The .gov and .edu add weight because those sites are powerful sites usually such as university domains or government sites. It has to do with the content not the name of the domain. a .com can be just as important as a .edu such as facebook.com

 

I dont think there is much difference, although I havent tested it much..

 

The tld or extension has nothing to do with ranking sites. .EDU links for instance quite clearly do not hold any more inherent value(this has been qualified repeatedly). It is however accurate that these extensions tend to be a bit more authoritative in nature. This is because of the content on the page or across the domain. It has nothing to do with the extension.

hope that clears things up,
Nigel

 

.edu and .gov is better because they are most strong

 

They don't carry any extra weight because of the .edu or .gov ending, but rather because these sites have massive amounts of backlinks.

 

Most of them have high PR and related to the famous university or government.

 

Matt Cutts has made it really clear that the tld makes no difference. Watch the video on it.

 

This is a total myth. Matt Cutts and others have confirmed this repeatedly. Google is TLD agnostic... They do not give preference to links from domains with any particular TLD.

If you'll recall, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s .edu and .gov links were sought after and were very effective links to get. But it wasn't because Google "trusted" these sites any more than other .com sites of the day. It was because .edu and .gov sites were usually very well linked in comparison to .com and .org sites at that time... so they had VERY high PR compared to most .com sites. There were very few high PR non-.edu and non-.gov sites.

In these early days of Google, PR "was" a very important ranking factor (as was keyword density). But things change... Google changed... And we are left with the fact that PR is a minor ranking factor these days compared to then.

Google has so many ranking factors today compared to then that the effect PR has on a URL's overall ranking for a particular keyword phrase has been greatly diluted... It doesn't affect rankings any where NEAR what it did in the early days of Google. PR likely also had its importance (i.e. it's weighting) in Google's ranking algorithm reduced because spammers just began spamming links to sites to make them rank regardless of whether the links were from relevant pages... regardless of whether the link text was relevant to the search phrase... just to manipulate the SERPS.

Keyword density, similarly, saw its importance in Google's ranking algorithm greatly reduced because SEOs would simply spam a page w/ a keyword phrase to get it rank.

There are millions of .com and .orgs now that are as well linked or better than most .edu and .gov sites. You can't get a decent link from a .edu and .gov site today. You "may" get a link on a .gov forum, but it's no better than a link from this forum. You may get a link from a student blog at a .edu, but it's no better than a link from a .com blog. Webmasters at .gov and .edu sites have pretty much locked them down. So unless you know the Dean or some university department head, you're not going to get a decent link from a .edu.

The .gov and .edu "ship sailed" years ago.

 

all great info, just wish Google wasn't so damn efficient some times you know. ......

 

But its really difficult to get a .edu or .gov back-links. I think a links from .edu or .gov will not be counted as spam by google ever. And according to my experience they are having some extra weight.

 

Yes, it's true. Google trusts .edu and .gov websites because they are non-commercial. So .edu and .gov websites have more weightage than .com websites.

 

yes it has a extra weight age. since its hard to get a back link from these sites.