Links for edu and gov sites

[limens]

So it is general knowledge that links from .edu and .gov sites are valued higher by Google.

So, I hired some guys on freelance sites to help me buildlinks and get some love from SERPS.

But one thing I notice quite often is that some of these links are actually like *.edu.tw  (with a international TLD after .edu)

What is your thoughts on links like that, do they have ANY edu value?

[nyanainc]

If you think logical like google thinks yes it have. Because is is still edu site but is just local.I think if you will like to rank good in one country you should purchase edu links from local sites.Maybe this kind of links will rank you in taiwan and not global.I didnt try it to tell you for shure.I hope that helps.

[TellThemEverything]

My instinct says that (if you are .com) they would be far less useful because they are not from your country - unless you really are targeting international search which I have no experience in.  Of course if your TLD matches, you're golden..

[Dan-Petrovic]

Sorry this gets me upset. What a load of bull*#& about .edu links. The only thing that's resulted from this myth is increased rate of spam on educational institutions around the world. I wish people would stop doing this.

Yes .edu domains tend to have good trust from search engines, but that doesn't mean that if you create an empty profile and whack in your link Google will factor this into their link graph, especially if you use duplicate or no content at all. Same goes for forum/comment spam.

To get great value from .edu domains (like with anything else) you would have to have a nice editorial link connected to another page or home page, pagerank and not 1000 outgoing links to viagra and payday loans. To get these types of links you would need to earn them through contribution, engagement or become some type of sponsor. Either way it isn't simple, quick or cheap.

If you base your link building on tactics like the one you describe above you're giving Google search quality team something to penalise you for if they get to review your website at some point in the future.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm afraid I have to generally agree with Dejan SEO. First off, the evidence that .edu and .gov links are really valued higher (at least over the last couple of years) is limited at best. SEOmoz did a correlation analysis in 2010 that suggested .gov links only slightly outperformed .com, and .edu under-performed .com -

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

Part of that may be due to the fact that higher education sites have been relentlessly spammed. It's just too easy to set up a profile on a deep page and get a cheap .edu link. That's the core problem, too. In general, a .gov or .edu site may have more trust or authority than the average .com (although I can't even prove that). That doesn't mean, though, that EVERY link on a .edu is worth more than EVERY link on a .com. That's a gross oversimplification that ignores the dozens of factors that define a link's value. See Rand's post here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

If you have a deep link on a .edu site on a page with no inbound links that links out to 400 sites, all of which are irrelevant and spammy, that link will be crap. It doesn't matter that it's on a .edu. That page may not even be indexed. Chasing .edu or .gov links ignores a lot of other factors.

Is suspect the international links are treated much like their .com equivalents. If your site operates in the US and is in English, and you get a .edu.tw (or .com.tw) link from a Taiwanese site written in Mandarin Chinese, that link is going to be low-value in the vast majority of cases.