Ok so for a long time now. People have been saying that links from .gov, .edu, .ac and other protected domains hold more “link” weight then normal .com links. By protected domains I mean domains that you cant just roll over to godaddy.com and buy straight off the shelf. And for the most part, i think it makes more sense. If Google is so caught up in making sure that “important” pages link to your site, then tracking these sorts of links would make sense. I mean PageRank is just googles way of assigning a number to how important your page is on the web, but holding a .gov implies importance just from the TLD.

But ofcourse, that shit never flies with google :

There is a bunch of stuff about Facebook + Twitter in there as well. But lets just focus on the EDU and GOV links part for the moment. Essentially he says that if you get a link from a .com PR5 page, it is exactly the same as a link from a .gov PR5 page. I have my suspicions about Cutts talking the truth on this one. And infact i wasn’t the only one. Here is a quote from the forum where the conversation started :

I think people are forgetting that Matt Cutts is the head of web spam team, of course he is going to say crap like we treat links equally etc, so that people stop spamming them. Imagine the guy said yes we do give so much power to Twitter links and Facebook links and we do give credit to nofollow, the spam on these sites would get ridicuous and the SERPs would turn to muck.

I think this is spot on. Cant say i thought about it like this before this guy showed up and threw in his 2cents. But it rings true incredibly well.

Just imagine if Matt Cutts came out and said, “Hell yeah we still track nofollow links, and yeah we give more weight to a link from .edu/.gov and even more weight from sites such as Twitter.com even if they are nofollow“. People would go bat shit crazy and just start spamming links left, right and center.

In a way, its Cutts job to throw people off spamming. Google doesn’t want it, but they also don’t want to punish webmasters that do get links from places like Facebook and Twitter. The logic is all there why a popular domain should hold weight, its just Google throwing everyone off the track. Gotta remember, if you ask Google what the best way to build links is : “Content Is King”.

pfft