A few years ago, if you’d have received a link from a .edu or .gov website you’d been told those were “high value” links – worth more than your average .com or .net link. But what about today? Andy Beal questions whether that is true based on a video by Matt Cutts.
Personally, I’ve always wondered. Most small business owners really don’t have a hope of obtaining these links. I mean, a .edu link is a link from a university. What would it take to get a university to link to you. You’d have to have some pretty valuable content for a university to link to you. Maybe that was the thinking behind the theory that those links are higher value links than your run-of-the-mill .coms.
I suppose the same would go for .gov links. But is it true?
I really don’t think it matters. I think the most important thing to remember about links is that if you get a link from a relevant site with a lot of traffic then that is going to benefit you. I really don’t know what other kind of link you’d want.
As Mr. Beal says, this is a blast from the past!
Mr. Cutts indicates in the video that it doesn't matter if the site is .edu or .gov, but it's the value of the site that matters. [He even references PageRank, another blast from the past.] That makes sense to me, but don't those sites inherently have more value?
But, I would also argue that a link from a .edu site to a automobile tire company would not have the same weight as a link from that same .edu site to a text book publisher. A link between a school and text book should carry more value due to the relevancy of the link, versus the tire company where there is little relevancy.
What if the .edu link to the tire company is from the mechanical sciences school’s home page? Wouldn’t that achieve the relevancy requirement?