I thought I’d take a minute to just clarify something that recently I’ve been seeing a lot more talk about, and it’s absolutely false. I’ve been doing a lot more link building campaigns for people lately, which in and of itself is fine. The problem arises when those that have hired us as an SEO company begin to question the means in which we do our SEO. Let me explain:
Client A hires us for a link building campaign and requests weekly reports. This is fine – we give daily reports if you want them, so no big deal there. Once the reports start rolling in, the client begins questioning the links which we are getting for them. “Why don’t we have any .edu or .gov links?”, they ask. So I answer – “Because I have not found any relevant pages on .edu or .gov domains that I can get links to you from.” Ok, problem averted – for now. The next week comes, and so does the same question. “When are we going to get some .edu and .gov links?”, they ask. So I begin to wonder if there’s a pattern forming here. I went on to explain to our client, as I’ll explain to everyone here right now: It is a myth that .gov and .edu links give you a bigger SEO boost than any other domain out there. This started some time back, many years ago, and while it may have been partially true in the old days of SEO – I see absolutely no benefit from it in today’s SEO world. Don’t believe me? Let me quote Matt Cutts:
“This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.”
The one thing to keep in mind here though, is the fact that .edu and .gov sites tend to not ever be involved in any “bad neighborhoods” and therefore you have less chance of getting involved in a bad linking scheme if you DO get links from .edu and .gov sites. These sites also tend to be considered authority sites in their niches and the domains are more than likely fairly old, all factors which help rankings. However, don’t think that just because you get a link from a .edu or a .gov that you’re getting something extra for the extension that you wouldn’t get from a .com, or even .info for that matter.
Don’t get me wrong here, I am not downing my client in any way for questioning the means in which we are getting them links. I expect that our clients will have many questions and concerns – after all, they hired us because they did not know how to do proper SEO themselves. We are here to help them and guide them every step of the way. This is just an example of how bad information permeates the Internet on a daily basis.
Fact of the matter is, this is just a common SEO myth that you should not pay any attention to!
