Are .EDU & .GOV Links Really Worth It?

@sgsmorgan

Thats very interesting, I have never heard that a .org is better than a .com in terms of naturally outranking, but I guess it makes sense. Are there any limits over what you can use a .org for?

P.S.

Fancy sharing any of the better non-commercial domain suffixes, I could purchase?

@shahidusman i'm guessing this is a wild estimate?

Thanks guys,

Sam

Exactly, thats why well crafted and thought out comments on Blog posts will always outrank profile links. Give something back and as I mention elsewhere, contribute positively to the community and "food chain" and you'll get good back links, traffic and kudos as well.

where can I purchase a .edu and .gov email address?

Now for a little reality.... all things being equal, .edus and .govs are no more powerful than any other domain extension. A PR 0 .edu with no links, no authority, etc, will give you the same link juice as a PR 0 .com with no links, no authority, etc.

I think folks do indeed have to be very careful here with regards to the Link Urls they purchase. On too many occassions folks buy .EDU or. Gov links to find out that in fact what they have purchased are in fact .edu.vn or .edu.peru etc which are not the same. The same exists with .Gov's. A .gov.my is not the same as a straight .Gov.

As to the power passed on, well we all know that Page Rank is effectively a busted flush with Googles exclusivity on the Page Rank Patent expiring in the future and Yahoo / Bing being able to muscle in on proceedings so Google have been quietly downgrading the Page Rank concept for some time prior to pulling out entirely.

It's gone from being a major part of the overall scheme of things to now being merely one of 200 ranking factors in their Algorithm. Not quite the same as it once was.e

The other thing that most folks seem to forget with all the "hoo ha" over the nofollow / dofollow attribute is that all this does is telll the Bots not to pass on any Page Rank attributes anyway not (and this is important) to stop following the link and to aid that for indexing purposes so in effect a PR5 link is almost the same as it once was.

Now as to why a .EDU or a .Gov is much more powerful than any .Com is down to the fact that the motivation and rationale behind the blogs are different. A .EDU is or was set up to provide a non commercial non biased communication channel for users (same as with .Govs) where a .com or .net etc was recognised as being more commercially biased therefore more suspect whereas the .EDU's or .Gov's weren't hence the power and so called believeability of links coming from .EDU'S or .Govs.

OK things aren't what they once were etc but I reckon for the next 12-18 months they will still hold sway anyway. Our research has shown that on average a Blog with 50 odd .EDU links sitting underneath it will outrank, out muscle any other Url with just .coms or .nets sitting under them.

Add to this some .Gov's and a couple of other nice domain suffixes then you are really talking - at least for the time being.

Bearing in mind the US Govt for issues and reasons of cyber crime etc will only publicly acknowledge the existence of about between 1500-2000 .Gov domains anyway (there are loads more we have proof) there is still an exclusivity and cache to links coming from them. They are not deemed to be spammy and if you can find a Url where the number of outbound links are really low then you are really talking etc.

Also don't worry about Nofollow / Dofollow - Google don't despite what they might say publicly and anyway Yahoo and Bing don't pay any attention either.