I have read many articles regarding the importance of getting backlinks from .gov and .edu sites. However, I understand it is all about getting backlinks from relevant sites only. Do these relevant backlinks help in SEO process?
Your ranking is based on getting *quality* backlinks. A PR8 site is supposed to be a quality site, or otherwise it would never have ranked that good. Thus, a backlink from a PR8 site will boost your ranking. .gov & .edu sites are also quality sites because those are government and university sites which supposedly are not commercial, have quality content, do not sell links and are supposed to be "serious" sites where spammers and dubious sites would never be approved. That's why .gov and .edu backlinks are being sought. And yes, those backlinks help quite a lot, but they're not so easy to obtain either...
Does it matter if a link is .edu or .com,a link is a link as long as it gives a backlink to your site.
No difference in .edu, .gov, .com, .org, .int, .info, .in etc..... only difference lies in content of site and Authority of the site. (if is another thing that most of .edu sites are authority sites, and all .gov, and .int are Highly Authority sites) I want to say check the quality and content of the page not just the doamin
Dude this is nonsense, the only reason why some edu and gov websites have some more value is because their age, trust and reputation/authority.