Link Building : PageRank Still Equals PageRank : Google

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Links from .edu or .gov Domains Are They The SEO Holy Grail?

Link Building

Link building is a very integral part of search engine optimization, and there are always many questions surrounding the best kinds of links. Most experts would say that highly relevant links from authority sites are the cream of the crop. But when those links are so hard to achieve, are there other types of links you could try to get?
.edu link search

Try searching for “edu text links” on Google and you’ll see ads from companies that promise to place links to your website on .edu web domains that are generally owned by US universities. The same is true for .gov domains as that are the official websites of US government.

One popular belief in the SEO community is that a link from a .edu or .gov domain carries a lot of link juice with the search engines. If any of these ‘trusted’ sites link to your site, your search rankings get a boost.

In a recent Google Webmaster Chat transcript this belief was debunked by Matt Cutts and John Mueller.

Questions and answers from the third online Webmaster Chat from October 22, 2008

TylerDee, TX: Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?

Matt Cutts: This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.

JohnMu: We generally treat all links the same - be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.

So it’s the site’s PageRank that counts and has much less to do with the top level domain of the site. This all means that your site may derive more Google link juice from an old blog hosted on blogspot or blogger than from any .edu University web page freshly launched.

Links for Sale on an University .edu Site

Stanford University’s site daily.stanford.edu initially had a Google PageRank of 9 but it was penalized by Google for selling links. They continue the practice of selling links and therefore the Google PageRank of the daily.stanford.edu site has plummeted to 4.

If you want to buy a link on that page, you will definitely get a backlink from the stanford.edu domain but it may not be as effective as you would like it be since the page itself has little Google juice to give away.

Still looking to score those coveted .edu links?

Back in 2007 Joe Whyte posted an article titled “Amazing technique to get FREE .edu backlinks that is 100% ethical“. If you want that .edu link to your site Joe’s solution is pretty simple and straight forward. “So why do people like .gov and .edu links? As martinibuster says, they tend to be in good neighborhoods (versus other sites, for example).”

Late,
Gary Pool

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This is a post from Gary Pool’s Search Engine Optimizician&trade blog.