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November 10, 2008

EDU Links & Circular Links: Do They Work?

Link building is a big part of search engine marketing, and as such, there are always questions surrounding the best kind of links. Most would say that highly relevant links from authority sites are the cream of the crop. But when those links are hard to achieve, there are other types of links you could try to get.

.edu and .gov links

In the recent Google Webmaster Chat transcript, there's a snippet about .govs and .edus. Matt Cutts says that there's no PageRank boost from having such links, and it'd be especially unhelpful for you if you get a link from an .edu page that doesn't have any inbound links to it.

So why do people like .gov and .edu links? As martinibuster says, they tend to be in good neighborhoods (versus other sites, for example).

Circular Links

What if your site -- let's call it Site A -- has a link to Site B. Site B links to Site C and Site C links back to Site A. In other words, you're interlinking your many sites (at least in this example). Will this help you in raising search rank?

Depending on the existence of other backlinks (more are preferable), it may help. Therefore, you should aim to get a lot of links from as many properties as you can and not just focus on your three sites. Having these links can also raise (cough) your PR.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, High Rankings Forum, and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.



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posted Tamar Weinberg in Link Building at November 10, 2008 9:58 AM Comments (5)

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Comments

This is an age old question. We have seen good results from link to .gov sites but at the end of the day it is tough to say exactly how much power they really give.

 

Posted by Nick Stamoulis at November 10, 2008 10:53

.edu .com .info .net

All are the same.

 

Posted by Vygantas at November 10, 2008 11:21

There is an old Google presentation that used Yahoo! as a specific example of a site that mighting receive an adjustment to its dampening value in the PageRank calculation. Based on that presentation, I and other people in the field suggested many times through the years that Yahoo! (and probably government sites) received favorable adjustments in the PageRank calculations.

Somehow, the link builders transformed that extrapolation into the hypothesis that links from such sites probably gave more PageRank.

Matt Cutts wrote on his blog a couple of years ago that "there is no EDU-boost" or "Yahoo!-boost".

He explained then that these links appeared to work better because they were from high quality sites that had a lot of inbound links.

The emphasis or value that people place on EDU and GOV links is only misplaced if the links are not positioned on prominent, high-value pages.

 

Posted by Michael Martinez at November 10, 2008 13:32

in my experience it makes no difference, like you say ,edu and .gov sites tend to be in good neighborhoods and have less spam linking to them

 

Posted by James Poole at November 10, 2008 15:03

Barry, someone creates a tool to check links, sees a few sites that have a lot of .gov and .edu with high PR and boila you have this theory stated as fact. The myth is then propagated across the the community by the "gurus" followers. Seen it with doorway pages and this. Anyone around longer than a day who had actually built a site with lots of crappy .edu knew this theory stated as fact was whacked!

 

Posted by No Name at November 11, 2008 08:06

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