Shocked at the title? Thinking i’ve gone nuts? Thinking the pressure got to me? Or I took cukoo pills this morning?
Well I’m RIGHT!
I’ve mentioned this before in an earlier post on characteristics of a good link my exact words were in fact:
In regards to .gov and .edu, im going to say in matters of TLD only no. They do not matter. A link for them is good yes, but only because those tlds are seen as ‘authority’ and garner loads of backlinks. So the authority passing from them is greater then a normal tld.
So in this post I just wanted to build on this topic a bit and just share some insight from the SEO Experts in the field.
Domain Authority and Links
There are ’3 main’ things we have to keep in mind Page Rank, Domain Authority and Page Authority.
Page Rank matters only in passing really, what we are after when we build links is Authority. This is why low PR pages can rank higher than you and why pages from High Domain Authority Sites can rank higher quickly.
A few Videos from Matt Cutts and SEOMoz dwelling deeper
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Domain Trust & Authority from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Another nail in the coffin
Pictures talk a lot better then words at time; so here are a few.
(OpenSiteExplorer.com used for data)
.edu vs .com
.gov vs .com
Conclusion
Well as you can see The Nexus is mediocre in terms of Authority (nearing the 50% mark ! 
) so a link from me will be of ‘some’ use but not to great. However looking at both the .gov and .edu in comparison to PerishablePress you can see that a link from Jeff’s front page would be worth ‘A lot’ more than the .edu and a bit more than the .gov.
When we are after ‘juice’ from the site we are not after its pagerank, no that can be a indication of authority yes but what we are after is an Authoritative link. A link that will say ‘Hey Google look i’m a respected site, I think this site is good too! look i’m linking to it!’
The reason why people say .gov and .edu sites are good because well look at the data from the .gov. It has a HUGE number of links from few sites, yet those sites are passing on authority to it because of their own high authority. Meaning because of the number and type of links .gov and .edu sites get they are generally high Authority sites and THAT is why they can be worth their weight in gold.
So when you are link building keep the links diverse and keep DA in mind. (SEO for firefox / SEmoz toolbar can show you this).
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- 9 Comments
- Tags: .edu links, .gov link, Backlinks, Google, Google Page Rank, high pr link, link building, links, Optimization, PageRank, Search Engines, traffic, Web traffic
I guess it makes sense but I don’t go chasing .gov or .edu links much anyway. I did see a product once that promised to place backlinks from PR4 and 5 .edu sites. It turns out they would just auto-create forum user profiles with dummy names and link back to your site. Often forum profiles are hidden behind a sign-in page so it seemed like a waste of time.
I wouldn’t disregard profile links that Search Engines CAN see completely. I’ll be doing posting a case study soon and my findings are well interesting to say the least.
I’m with Michael, I agree with what you’ve presented here but I’m not one to chase those sorts of sites. I just don’t have the time, nor the inclination.
Good on you for working all this out though because I dare say there are those who would love to know this sort of stuff.
Thanks for the compliment! I’ve got sooo many drafts in my dashboard this is just one I finally got round to ‘polishing’. Though yes I do feel it would be a very useful post to beginners so they know what time of link to target
Here’s what I saw in your screen shots, Don: that .edu site still had pretty high domain authority, with virtually NO links.
What if they had the same amount of links the .com site has? It’s logical to assume that their domain authority would shoot through the roof then.
Thoughts?
Hey Ana,
The above example was slightly flawed as the .edu was a subdomain so the main domain was giving intrinsic Authority to the sub-domain. The main domain has about 40k links to it (using yahoo back link).
SO what it does show is that Main domains pass on DA to their subdomains ….so back to my parasite host post linked above. you can see why they are such a key method for acquiring strong links
So no I still go with my original theory that there is no ‘base’ intrinsic benefit to the tld.
It’s interesting that in the video above you see Matt talking about how it doesn’t matter about .edu or .gov, but it’s clearly a factor. Is that based on the fact that a .edu or .gov site will gain Page Rank and higher authority weight sooner than most .coms due to their domain? And then that weight is passed on to their out bound links?
I think its more to do with the fact that .edu and .gov site ‘content’ is more recognised as an authority and therefore that is why they get higher PR/DA faster than a .com. Not because of intrinsic tld value. Though this is just conjecture. I have no proof to say this is true.
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