Do .edu and .gov backlinks really make a difference?

I've been reading up on it, and I've heard a lot of different answers. Seems that white hat SEO people say a back link is a back link, as long as the back link has relevant content to your site, then on the black hat side of SEO people say .edu and .gov back links are essential in ranking for keywords quickly.

So I guess what I'm asking is does edu and gov back links make a difference? Cause no matter what the niche it's probably unlikely to find an edu/gov website that's relevant to your content, which some people say is all that matters in building backlinks, relevance.

It doesn't, from experience. But a lot of people are selling edu and gov links in this forum so they will definitely tell you it makes a difference.
Most of my sites that are in page 1 of a very competitive keyword, or keywords practically has no edu backlinks. They definitely do not have gov backlinks.

Hi phpfail,
See, only education institutions can have a edu extension and only government institutions can have gov extension, that's why search engines value that back-link a lot, Virtually 1 edu or 1 gov equals to 100 regular back-links.
Don't get me wrong you can always rank with regular back-links like Mr dragonrage01 here, but look at it this way who would you trust? the next person or an institution.
Well back-links is a vote of trust so it does matter where they come from.
Hope that helped, good luck.

KnowledgeFirst said:

Hi phpfail,
See, only education institutions can have a edu extension and only government institutions can have gov extension, that's why search engines value that back-link a lot, Virtually 1 edu or 1 gov equals to 100 regular back-links.
.

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I highly doubt that 1 nofollow .edu or .gov link is worth 100 regular do follow links.

100 regular links ? Doubt it too.

I posted on some .edu domains recently and already 2 are indexed,maybe that's why I'm on page 1 now.

I used to have 200+ edu and gov sites. I used to post my links for different websites on them a lot of times. My serps barely increased. The sad part was that after some time, my edu links disappear because the websites get spammed by a lot of people so webmasters deletes the whole forum or blog.

Edu and gov sites doesn't mean they are from the US. A lot are from other countries. So more quality or more link juice isn't always the case. Most edu/gov places that allow d()follow links are not governed or they do not have moderators so they get spammed a lot which means no link juice at all.

Gov/Edu sites are a waste of time. They will not help you short term and they will definitely not help you long term.

dragonrage01 said:

It doesn't, from experience. But a lot of people are selling edu and gov links in this forum so they will definitely tell you it makes a difference.
Most of my sites that are in page 1 of a very competitive keyword, or keywords practically has no edu backlinks. They definitely do not have gov backlinks.

Click to expand...

:bs2:

I like the way you think... It helps me out.

I've not done any testing myself. There are two groups of people and frames of mind. The first are the ones telling you the massive serp increases they get, that it's hard to get .edu links so Google loves them... and often they sell these links The second is the group that says they don't matter at all - just like other links. Google (Cutts) said that EDU doesn't really hold anymore weight than others, too. So... take your pick or do your testing.

Did your links got indexed. Did you have any relevant text around these links?
I always got increase from edu backlinks. It is one way to get yours sites out of sandbox.

What Google says really doesn't matter. They doesn't want many people to spam edu sites. But links from edu sites are natural sign that site content is really good.

Both have good authority so i guess it doesnt matter.

If the links are from Pagerank pages then they surely are Imp! from which ever extension they are.

Honestly, I think they do have more juice IF, and only if, you don't over do it. Do you really think Google is gonna believe 100+ edu/gov sites are gonna be pointing to your site unless its about school, students, education,..etc? Think about it...

Also, I built 30-40 none spammed edu links to my site and get sandboxed a few days later.

KnowledgeFirst said:

Hi phpfail,
See, only education institutions can have a edu extension and only government institutions can have gov extension, that's why search engines value that back-link a lot, Virtually 1 edu or 1 gov equals to 100 regular back-links.
Don't get me wrong you can always rank with regular back-links like Mr dragonrage01 here, but look at it this way who would you trust? the next person or an institution.
Well back-links is a vote of trust so it does matter where they come from.
Hope that helped, good luck.

Click to expand...

Haha this is just funny, 100 regular links?! I could dominate any keyword if that was true.

No. TLD doesn't matter. What matters is the link juice you get. Obviously a PR5 .edu link will be more valuable than a PR4 .com link but at the same time a PR5 .info will be more valuable than a PR4 .edu. If you don't trust me just test yourself. Obviously you can't find links that provide identical value so if the difference is not significant consider there's no difference. Also my comparison with PR5 and PR4 is just to make a point as PR is not the only important attribute of a link (e.g. an editorial link from a PR4 page that has just your link on it as an external d0f0llow link is a lot more valuable than a link from a d0f0llow comment link on a PR5 page that has 50 external d0f0llow comment links some of them pointing to shady sites). From experience I can tell you that a single highly relevant editorial link from a PR3 page on a trusted PR7 domain increased my rankings from #5-15 to #1-3 for hundreds of keywords. Just a link. So when you hear people saying "a link is a link" tell them "a woman is a woman so why don't u marry an ugly hooker with AIDS?"

I have found that they do indeed matter, and that by building quality blog posts (hand spun content from my main site), and then then doing a small link blast to blogs/forums backlinking to the edu that it did boost my SERP by several positions.

This is playing with a site that is 90% social network traffic, trying to rank difficult keywords mainly as an experiment. The results could be really attributed to a number of other factors as well. But before we did the edu we were on page 2 for our keywords and now we are in 5th position page 1.

Then again it could all just be the google dance. I'm started to experiment with niche sites and adsense using my lessons learned, so we will see if the results using the method are repeatable over the next 2 months.

madoctopus said:

So when you hear people saying "a link is a link" tell them "a woman is a woman so why don't u marry an ugly hooker with AIDS?"

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LOL
madoc, well said.
like all your posts