How much do you believe that Google loves .edu and .gov sites and domains more than any others and therefore value these backlinks more?  Three years ago when I first heard of this, people were just obsessed with getting these links because they were like goldmine for their link building used in dominating Google search engine ranking.

Well fast forward three years later today, people still have the same belief even after Matt Cutts in an interview last year openly denied this. This is what he said:

Matt Cutts:
“…..edu or .gov links are good – and when there are good links, .edu links tend to be a little better on average; they tend to have a little higher PageRank, and they do have this sort of characteristic that we would trust a little more. There is nothing in the algorithm itself, though, that says: oh, .edu – give that link more weight.”

Well what this essentially means is that Google treats all links the same but then again why do we know that Google seems to love high PR sites and crawl these sites like every hour at least. And we know that .edu and .gov tend to have higher PR than most other websites. Matt even said so in the interview.

Essentially he says that if you get a link from a .com PR5 page, it is exactly the same as a link from a .gov or .edu PR5 page. Then again most .edu and .gov websites are recognized as the more trusted sites compared to others like .com sites don’t you think. In fact many people feel that too many of Google’s algorithms rely on the trust factor a little too much. So does this somewhat mean Google has to like .edu sites because of this high trust they accord them. Perhaps these are the sites who are usually linked to government and educational organizations. They are clean sites without a trace of any bad links and probably never quite knew the vocabulary of ‘bad neighborhood’.

Many people didn’t quite believe all that Matt Cutts said in that interview. Perhaps saying what he did was a politically correct answer. And who could blame him. After all think of what Google might have to contend with, with all the spamming that would follow if he said Google regards these websites and backlinks differently.

Even the much respected Aaron Wall did not believe this to be true when he gives us the Proof That Google Loves EDU and GOV Sites.

So what do you think?

Do you still think that .edu or .gov backlinks are nothing special.  I like to hear your views on this interesting topic.

My Gift to you:

I am giving you for free a Backlink Packet containing 10 high PR EDU LInks (PR 8 – PR3), which has full details on their urls, how and where to post your backlinks details. (It’s similar to the way we do for Angela’s backlinks, if you’ve subscribed)

New Update: I now have 1 PR4 .gov link url to be given away too so will add this link to be given away together with the 10 .edu links. Well it can’t get any better. Please come back and check out here again for any new freebie links I might add on.

My Requirement from you: Simple – Just subscribe to my blog via email subscription and drop a comment here saying you have done so and I will email you the link to this backlink packet. If you have already subscribed via email previously, just tell me that and I’ll also send you once this has been verified. The reason why I don’t put up this link here is that this blog is now getting its fair share of spamming and I want to prevent these people from spamming the .edu sites.

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