Many webmasters work long and hard to find ways to gain those valuable .edu and .gov backlinks. Many ways have been developed and discovered to get these links, but do they really provide more value than a link from a similar .com site?
According to Google, the answer is no. During a recent webmaster chat session, Googles’s John Mueller make it clear that there is no special benefit to these links. “This is a common misconception – you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link,” he said. He and Matt Cutts claim that Google “generally” treats all links the same, but they weren’t clear by what was meant by the word “generally”.
Although there may not be an immediate benefit as claimed by the experts, the ture value comes from the type of sites that typically link to .edu and .gov sites. They tend to be less spammy and therefor the link juice that is passed through is better.
