Educational and Governmental ref. backlinks/domains

[FRUTIKO]

I have two question in my mind, decided to first time post and ask the community for better information.

1-How important Educational and Govermental Ref Domains/backlinks are? Shell we try to gain them? Or they are just like the others backlinks/domains?

2-When we break down the backlinks to Images-textlinks. What percent of backlinks should be images? (for info my website has 97 percent textlink and 3 percent image backlinks)

[SEO5Team]

1. IMHO .edu and .gove links if acquired in the right manner without any spamming tactics or redirects are still very effective for link building.

2. The percentage of image links really depends on your vertical. If you own a photography site, it might so happen that a high percentage of your links would be from images shared on different sites across the net. The keyword here is "natural". If it appears natural for your site to have a high percentage of inbound links from images, then you should not  have anything to worry about.

Good article on this topic here.

[ReferralCandy]

WIth reference to your question on edu & gov backlinks, it wouldn't be worth spending a lot of your effort on gaining them. Matt Cutts mentioned once in a video response that .edu & .gov backlinks do not necessarily worth more than .com links (http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/01/do-you-still-care-about-gov-or-edu-links.html).

Besides, it is important to obtain more backlinks from sites related to your business/niche, as compared to getting backlinks from edu & gov pages which have no relation to your business/niche. It won't help much in building up your site's authority if you go for the latter.