Is it pointless getting .gov or .edu backlinks?

Is it pointless getting .gov or .edu backlinks?

For a long time, SEO experts have believed that links from government (.gov) or educational (.edu) sites are worth their weight in gold. Educational and government institutions are unbiased, respected sources of information (more so than the average Joe.info) and so a link from them is a good sign that your site is also trustworthy.

So is this actually the case? Does a .gov or .edu backlink give you more “oomph” purely owing to the snazzy TLD? Or is this the internet equivalent of an old wives’ tale?

It seems the camp is divided. On one hand we’ve got the “official word” coming from Google spokesperson Matt Cutts, saying that there is no bias towards government and education links. He mentions it in his video blog (fast forward to about 4.20) and again more recently on his personal blog page.

... And on the other hand we have anecdotal evidence from respected voices in the SEO community who say that Google is spinning a yarn right there. Prominent SEO blogger Aaron Wall expressed his disbelief in a blog post where he describes sites with lower PageRanks performing better than sites with higher PageRanks. Guess what these low PR sites had? Links from .edu and .gov domains.

Big-time SEO analysts SEOMoz also came to the incredulity party, with a line from Google’s US patent application (#20050071741 - Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data, for the snoops amongst you), which speaks in part of using “government documents” as a factor that attributes a greater level of “trust” to the link.

So who is right here? Are Google just trying to obfuscate this fact so that education departments don’t start selling links to boost faculty budgets? Is it actually true that government and education sites just tend to have higher PageRanks, and that’s why their links can be so valuable?

We’re not picking sides in this debate. Instead we’re going to say that if you want to try it out, we’ve got a pretty cool tool for helping you pick up some .edu and .gov backlinks...

In the Trusted Sites Tool, you can search for government or educational sites from a number of different regions including the USA, Australia, Germany, New Zealand and the UK / Ireland. The trusted sites tool will search for relevant government and education sites that allow you to contribute content – either on a forum or a blog post.

To use it, simply enter your keyword phrase in the Keyword field. For example, if you are in the dog training niche, enter a broad phrase like “dog training”, and the tool will generate a report with a list of pages where you can post a link to your site.

Trusted Sites Screenshot

Lets have a look at the table of results above – In the keyword column, you'll see the main keyword that has been found on the site. The site type indicates whether the site is a a blog or forum. The Extension tells you whether it's an education or government site. The Follow icon shows if the backlink from user contributed content is a no-follow (red x), a do-follow (green tick) or unknown (question mark). You can sort the report by clicking on the column headings. For the example above, I've sorted the table by PageRank by clicking the PR column heading, so I can select the sites that have the highest PageRank.

The Link to Comment is the link to take you to the specific page the tool has found. Click on this link to go and post a comment with a link back to your site!

For some people this might be where it would end, but let me suggest some other strategies you could also use to get better quality backlinks from these sites. If you've found a site that is particularly relevant to your niche, offer to write a guest article or blog as an expert in the field. If you approach this in the right way, chances are you'll get the opportunity to post a link to your site, and this will likely be a higher profile link than if you had just commented in their blog or forum.

Educational sites are often lacking in style and design – if you've developed some web design or SEO skills in your site building activity, why not offer your services to help them bring their website up to date. They may well be happy for you to add a link back to one of your sites – just be up front and open about doing it!

There are plenty of other strategies you could consider too – be creative! We'd love to hear of any ideas that you're using to generate links from these respected sites – does anyone have anything they'd be willing to share?

Start using our Trusted Sites Tool now! If you need more help, watch the training video under 'Getting Started'. If you're not a premium member – sign up today to access this tool, and all our other Affiliate Marketing tools exclusively available with premium membership!

45 Comments
Mac iPhone ringtone maker at 14:04 1 Mar 2010
Impressive!. We learned a lot here.
Rudolf55 at 20:22 1 Mar 2010
So.. this is post is just to make me purchase the Premium membership? The topic question remains unanswered..
Daniel at 22:10 4 Mar 2010
This post is beyond informative! The understanding I am under is that .edu and .gov links are not inherently more unique than .com or .net, but they are actually more linked to and less linked out from...so that's what makes them so valuable. I've been getting mine from http:/www.edublogfinder.com

There are so many other creative ways to do so and your post outlines just that!
anti spam software reviews at 23:04 5 Mar 2010
It seems as if this debate is one of those evolution vs creation type arguements.. truth be told there are so man fators when it comes to ranking in the serps that we'll never know. By the way nice piece of software ... looks very useful
loans at 17:28 9 Mar 2010
I want to thank the blogger very much not only for this post but also for his all previous efforts. I found www.affilorama.com to be greatly interesting. I will be coming back to www.affilorama.com for more information.
okey prezervatif at 14:37 23 Apr 2010
I think it's right, so many people, try to get backlink from edu sites.
matt marksbury at 11:53 26 Apr 2010
Very interesting post, Ive been searching edu sites and picked up a few links but it is hard to find the ones that allow html
Paul Schmidt at 12:13 8 Jun 2010
Thanks for the post. Very informative and provides some great insight into strategies to test.
joshep_mafia at 9:40 4 Jul 2010
Great information. Thanks for sharing. i really need this topic
Aden Curtis at 2:43 27 Jul 2010
Ah Mark, to backlink or not to backlink, esp. .gov and .edu

It's certainly a controversial area and my personal experience with high page rank site backlinks and .edu backlinks has demonstated little weight in backlinking at all. Oh, I still do it and intend to until my domain age exceeds 1 year. Having so many SEO experts guide this along certainly must mean it has some merit, if not for all, at least for some. At least that's my reasoning.

I've even seen a matrix that demonstates the power of a single .edu or .gov backlink by equating it to -x- number of .com sites, but I'm really beginning to question all of it. Maybe Gooogle and the other big SEs are changing their equations again.
Wally at 0:04 21 Sep 2010
Thanks for the post. I am definitely convinced of the power of edu backlinks. Thanks for your tips.
Thom Noble at 21:47 29 Sep 2010
i thought that websight had a scale like 1-10 10 being good and the higher on the scale the website that your backlinking from the more relevant you make your sight or rase your scale
home based business at 7:14 20 Oct 2010
I really think that depends if google pushes a do follow on that website or blog. People try hunt down edu and gov , you can goodle search this site:.edu inurl:blog"post a comment"-"comments closed" -"you must be logged in" to find the results
Tim White at 18:13 28 Oct 2010
Thanks Daniel for the http://edublogfinder.com link.

I spent just a little time on this and got some easy backlinks.

Backlinks seems to be the hardest part of this process and I have had very little luck with any automated system.
Amit at 1:08 6 Dec 2010
Very useful post especially coz i got two seo tools to help hunting relevant .gov .edu urls. :)
bet365 at 7:50 11 Dec 2010
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Jake at 20:58 4 Jan 2011
I have been trying to educate my readers on my mailing list for days about the importance of .edu links. Some seem to take an interest but the majority of them seem keen to blow money on backlink packets. Maybe I will send some of them over here to learn from the real experts...

Thanks

Jake
Luke at 16:40 10 Jan 2011
Very nice tool.
Santosh Prasad at 4:55 19 Jan 2011
nice post..
but where is the answer for which this post has been generated.. ? :P
question still remains unanswered..

and i agree to the fact that.. .gov .edu has less number of links that any .com or .net link page thats why they get more juice or say more value towards linking structure..

another good point i had covered during my current project.. that bing's crawl rate is faster than google's..

so if ur site is performing good in bing after some work on ur project.. it is likely to get good ranking in google's paradigm too :D
Samuel at 1:38 1 Feb 2011
Thanks for the valuable info.I tried it and I have been getting tons more traffic.

Thanks Dude.
Battle Los Angeles at 17:28 9 Feb 2011
Resources like the one you mentioned here will be very useful to me! I will post a link to this page on my blog. I am sure my visitors will find that very useful.
Brent Selwyn at 9:47 15 Feb 2011
Thanks for an in teresting and thought provoking post Mark. I have sought to try to obtain 'follow' .edu and 'gov links to my legal review sites in the belief that these type of links are more powerful than 'ordinary' links. I suppose like anything the secret is in finding a balance. Regards. Brent
Mallorca Finca at 21:02 20 Feb 2011
Thanks for post! it is very helpful information. :)
Brian at 17:29 25 Mar 2011
I think like most things, Google hides alot of their information. If they didn't give more authority to some sites over others then there would be no need for a page rank at all I would think.
Morgan at 17:31 10 Apr 2011
Google, the all powerful. Who really knows what goes on behind the curtain. All we do know is that getting a winning position within the Google SERP is a must if we want to have a successful website. Until Toto comes along and pulls the curtain back, we just have to keep on trying the things that appear to work.
Jeff Moreau at 4:35 22 Apr 2011
Hi, Great post with some good information on this subject.
Have heard for years now that this was the way to get some great links.
Jeff
thom at 19:34 29 Apr 2011
Very interesting post, Ive been searching edu sites and picked up a few links but it is hard to find the ones that allow html
upload and earn at 17:23 13 May 2011
Thanks for the post. I always enjoy reading your blog.

Keep'em coming more frequently.

Best!
Robert at 3:24 15 May 2011
I thought they were more valuable. Well Google changes every 6 minutes
Chris Parker at 13:05 12 Aug 2011
Thanks for the post.
Atif Silal at 8:42 23 Aug 2011
Although there are lot lot of blogs and websites where this debate discuss about .edu and .gov ,but this is fact that the writer here give lot of unique and sourceful information,I agree with writer and congrate for writing such good post
credit card consolidation at 23:42 23 Aug 2011
I dont think its pointless, i found edu and gov links to be rather successful???
education at 6:53 24 Aug 2011
Thanks for the post :)
James Gordon at 12:18 3 Sep 2011
I read a lot forums and most people say .edu and .gov backlinks are important and valuable than normal backlinks. It's rather confusing though and google webmasters would have already known this fact and updated their algorithm!
Tyler Peng at 21:37 8 Sep 2011
Many SEO tools include .edu and .gov backlinks as a measure of competition, seems like there's widespread agreement that these backlink (which cant usually be registered by just anyone) produce more link juice / trust with the search engines.. Im not sure about google though anymore
Timage at 19:15 20 Sep 2011
I'm quite sure whether a link is from a .edu or a .gov site is quite irrelevant. The reality, as far as I can tell, is that a .edu or a .gov domain is more likely to have content that creates trust, and is more likely to be linked to because in the eyes of real people they are trusted. They will also generally get a significant amount of traffic.

But this doesn't mean that an edu link is better than, for instance, a .info link, if the .info site is reputable and the .edu one is not.

If you get a link from a dodgy subdomain on a .edu or .gov site, you won't get any benefit. There are ways to buy these kinds of links, and they are completely worthless.
turner.phillip3 at 5:55 3 Oct 2011
I think that getting a back-link from theme based site/content has much importance than to getting it from any .edu or .gov site. These sites are known for their trustworthiness, so only if you have relevant information then try to post.
jayachandran at 16:42 1 Nov 2011
Really useful for a newbie like me..
Thanks Bro..
how to get more youtube views at 6:11 7 Nov 2011
It seems that there are a lot of different views on the subject. I can attest to much higher rankings when edu and gov links are used.
noel vintage lights at 20:36 25 Nov 2011
A lot thinks that edu and gov links can help in better ranking fast but I think it will always depend on what you post and how you make use of it...
fotograf nunta at 13:16 11 Dec 2011
I think that edu and gov are very helpfull at least when you have a young blog
majed at 22:58 11 Dec 2011
really interesting, thanks for sharing
ait_patialcash at 3:52 28 Dec 2011
One also has to remember the fact that government websites are often updated regularly due to frequent policy changes in corresponding government departments. Due to this, search bots regularly crawl such websites and hence, any backlinks found on them are able to quickly thrust a site to top rankings.

Although the debate regarding backlinking power of government websites has been around for quite some time, I believe there is absolutely no doubt as far as their trustworthiness and authority as backlink partner is concerned.
johnstonannam at 2:47 2 Jan 2012
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toplist at 3:41 22 Jan 2012
and gov links can help in better ranking fast but I think it will always depend on what you post and how you make use of it...

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