They are really effective....

You can find some good edu links in peoples WSOs and there is also a thread which eludes me right now that showed you how to search for open .edu or .gov wordpress blogs that you can leave comments on.

A quick search through here should get you what you need.

Yes they are,,,

.edu and .gov domains are indeed well known for being very trusted sources. However, you have to be very careful when sourcing these types of links as most .edu and .gov pages which you can get a link from will already be spammed by people simply after any inbound link.

However, @BarryWheeler posted the following useful tip to find .edu (or .gov) backlinks in another thread I came across which talked about .edu links.

I thinks yes .edu and .gov back links are useful for getting the ranking.

All links are valuable. Diversification is the key to success. You need to have a natural footprint when it comes to link building.

Yes they are effective. But finding these kinds of links is quite a hard tasks. But I have seen a thread here in warrior giving free .edu and .gov links, but I think that particular thread was buried already.

They are really effective....

That's an old days story, Now search engines don't give any special advantage to .edu and .gov links, They are being treated same as any other TLD backlinks

.edu and .gov back links are effective for SEO purposes. But no more effective than any other top level domain is. The hype of how much better they are is disputed by Matt Cutts. I saw him smile one day when he answered this question and he went on to say that they do not value any TLD any more than another. i wish I had the URL to show you the video, but I don't have it any more.

For those that don't know Matt Cutts, he is an engineer for Google and often speaks to IM people advising them on things like this. I take him as an authority, as do most that know him.

People said they are effective. I have seen sites rank for competitive keywords without those links.

Their is an Matt cutt's live blogging Q & A summary where matt disclosed something interesting about JC penny's as below:

"Matt goes on to say that JC Penney didn’t regain rankings because it added a lot of .edu links via job postings. We don’t give a boost because of the TLD — .gov or .edu. It’s that those domains tend to get lots of quality links."

As mentioned by Matt Cutts they tend to not give extra weight because its an EDU itself, rather they give weight as the domain trust and overall pagerank of an EDU or GOV domain is amazing which gets passed along to your domain by getting links from those sources.

I think google put more weigh on these sort of backlinks

Still these backlinks are effective as the results many are getting good.This is part of seo and it is always useful to have these backlinks for our sites.

The tld is important the real edu links are carrying some more weight than ordinary links,as long as they are not spammed.