What Is This I Keep Hearing About .gov And .edu Backlinks Being So Great?

One of the most commonly held beliefs among the SEO world is that .GOV and .EDU backlanks somehow hold more power than normal links. If you have purchased a training course or two, you will have no doubt been told to get as many of these types of links as you can. Now don't get me wrong here, these two types of backlinks are great and they are definitely worth pursuing, and I'll tell you why in a minute.

A quick word of caution here though, make sure you don't go out and get a hundred .GOV or .EDU backlinks in one day. Unless of course you do this on a regular basis. It won't look natural in Google's eyes and you will probably do nothing but hurt yourself. This is true for any link building campaign though, because it's all about looking natural in the eyes of the search engines.

Just because a site has a .EDU or .GOV extension doesn't lend any additional weight to it in the eyes of the search engines. Most importantly, what the search engines like Google care about are links and the power of them. So basically, government and educational sites hold the same power as other sites.

The strength of a .EDU or .GOV site can be weighed just like any other site, by the quantity and quality of incoming links the site has. Not only that, but also how the internal linking structure is designed, as well the on-page SEO aspects. All of these play an important role in the ultimate strength of the site, but even with as much testing and experimenting that has taken place over the years, one can still only make a very well educated guess about what Google expects. In the end, unless you get a paycheck from them personally, you will probably never know the exact algorithms used.

If I had to guess, I would say the reason this belief is so widespread, is that the majority of .EDU and .GOV sites are actually very high quality sites that have a good number of incoming links from other sites. They also most likely acquire these backlinks in a more natural way than most other sites. Again, the search engines are all about being natural. This is why they view websites that have a good deal of outbound links pointing to higher authority sites as being more of an authority site themselves.

That is what the internet is all about after all. So, if you haven't guessed yet, it is quite beneficial to build some backlinks from these two types of sites. It is almost a given that they will be high quality sites, both from the content on these sites as well as the quality of backlinks they have. In conclusion, my goal was to clarify why .GOV and .EDU sites were so sought after in many marketers link building efforts. Not because Google or other search engines give the extension any extra weight, but because by default they are usually high quality sites with many other high quality links pointing to them.

By: Andrew Duley

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