DinoCagney nobody is denying that the site in question has its rankings due to the link from the .gov website. The reason that it is a powerful link has nothing to do with the domain extension. The link is so powerful because it is from an authority website based on its age and number of incoming links. Do you think they would have the same ranking if their one good link was from a brand new .gov site with few links? I seriously doubt it. vjlenin, no offense but you are giving false information. You are wrong about .gov and .edu and you are wrong about sites getting penalized for buying links. The search engines can only punish a website for selling links. If they were to punish websites for buying links, there would be a big seo war of companies buying links pointing to their competitor's websites. All the search engines can do is to give no value to purchased links.
.edu and .org are authoritive, get more weight from google. I don't think Matt Cutts will release any algorithm.
we shouldnt' worry about what we can't get. Only worry about what you can get and what you can do with it.
I agree with kingofsanda that all domains extension carrys equal weight but most of the .edu and .gov sites have high pr which results in giving more weight to those who are linked by them. Because peoples use to freely links to .gov and .edu sites, and .gov / .edu sites gain some good pr. I have seen several edu sites and most of them have PR6+ (homepages)
I would've hoped that a person with close to 500 posts does a lot more reading than they do posting. They do not get more weight from Google. They are generally just intrinsically authoritative!
I am agree with you sir . But i don't think that just by having few .gov back links our sites can rank higher .
I do agree that .gov links are more valuable (sorry to all that disagree) however if we look at one of the big problems Google has with links it's that SEO's all over the place are ransacking every other resource to build links. .gov sites Google can trust as it's so hard to get links on them unless you're a real-for-real resource and worth linking to from a high-authority site that doesn't sell links. But that's just my two-bits worth.
To say he's using the wrong criteria is like saying a movie wasn't successful because it was a great movie; it's because a gazillion people went to see it.
I too have read this in Matt Cutts Blog. So there is no special treatment for .gov or .edu websites. The only advantage with them is they provide quality information with good backlinks.
The lesson here isn't that .gov sites are better rated, it is that one quality in content link from an authority site is better than hundreds of crappy links. Forget about PR and forget about total number of links. Focus on getting links from highly reputed (authority) sites and links from highly related sites, in content, and your site will also rank highly. Of course if you can get thousands of high PR in content related links that is even better