Is a .edu or .gov link just another link?

A very common request I will hear is, "do you guys have access to any .edu or .gov links?".  The answer is "no" and I have felt for some time that many link builders put too much emphasis on the search for these links.  For many link builders, .edu and .gov links are the "dmoz" links of a couple of years ago.  Meaning, I think the height of the DMOZ craze was about two years ago when many website owners thought getting listed in DMOZ was the magic pill to shoot to the top of the search results.

Now I am not saying that DMOZ, .edu, or .gov links are not links worth having but I do think their is some evidence that they are not the silver bullet to the top.  You need many quality, or as Mr. Hagans would say "trusted links", and spending weeks on end trying to get the one .edu or .gov link is in my opinion not any more valuable then securing a few other non .edu or .gov quality links.  Is there now some evidence of this?  Maybe...(below quote taken from Blogoscoped who transcripted off Matt Cutt's new seo video)Somebody else asked about links
from .govâs and .euâs, and whether links from two level deep .govâs and
.euâs (like gov.pl), are worth the same as .gov. And the fact is, we
donât really have much in the way to say, this is a link from the ODP,
or from .gov, or .eu, to give that some sort of special boost. Itâs
just those sites tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link
to them (and reputable people link to them).So this statement seems to say that Dmoz, .edu. and .gov links are not given special treatment from Google it is just that these links generally have higher PR and are just another trusted link.  I say build quality links like crazy and not worry about these three alleged special links.  What have you readers seen in regards to this?  Are Dmoz, .gov, and .edu all glitter and no gold?

When Your Domain is TR0

Bigdaddy was a turning point for hardcore Google organic SEO. Why? Graywolf said it best:What I am here to say is I think we are hitting the leading edge of a
new force to be addressed with, which for lack of a better term Iâm
calling âsandbox crawlingâ. Hereâs the way I see it, if your website is
missing the right âquality indicatorsâ what youâll start to see is
superficial crawling and indexing of your website. Your site which may
have had hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages
will just not be as well represented in Googleâs index as you would
like it to be.Great, now we have to worry about 'just getting indexed' again? What is this, 1999?


Matt Cutts of course had already basically confirmed what Graywolf said:Some folks that were doing a lot of reciprocal links might see less
crawling. If your site has very few links where youâd be on the fringe
of the crawl, then itâs relatively normal that changes in the crawl may
change how much of your site we crawl. And if youâve got an affiliate
site, it makes sense to think about the amount of value-add that your
site provides; you want to provide a reason why users would prefer your
site.Of course it always comes back to links, and link = trust. (And now for you affiliates, you have to make sure you have a 'value add' in Google's eyes, or the Eval team might nail you.)

But back to indexing. Domains with very low trust will have trouble getting fully indexed (they may go home-page only, or have, say 10% of their pages in). Now, for a domain that gets fully indexed, we won't know how much trust it has--it could be "very trusted", or "mostly trusted", or just "somewhat trusted"--but we will know it at last has more than "very low trust".

Which in my opinion is very useful. Aside from whether a site ranks or not, this is the only indication Google is going to give us on any given domain's TrustRank. PageRank they leave wide open, but obviously TrustRank is now the trump card to rank. Try checking that in the toolbar.

So here's how observing the sandbox crawling helped me. I recently launched a site -- database-driven, affilitiate, and yes value-added with all unique content thank you for asking -- on a 2003ish PR5 domain. I expected, of course, to leverage all of its trust to gain instant rankings, wealth, romance, and fame ;-)

So we went live with the site, and one week later -- still homepage only. (When we acquired the site/domain, it was just a one-pager, so this didn't represent a decrease in pages indexed.) Two weeks later -- homepage only. (By this time we probably had 200 pages or so live.) Three, four weeks later -- still homepage only.

Mama didn't raise no fool, I don't know why or how, but I know this domain has the proverbial "TR0". Rather than whine and complain about it (well, actually, I probably did that for a bit), we grabbed a new domain -- something brandable -- and switched the site over.

Now a new domain probably isn't any better than the other one we had, and I wanted the launch to go right, dang it. So I grabbed it every trusted link that I could (quickly) -- Dir.yahoo.com, Sbd.bcentral.com, Business.com, a hosted adverpage on an older domain, and an in-content link from an old, ranking (trusted) related site that a friend owns (Thanks mate!)... Two days later, bam! 28 pages in, four days later, 160 pages in.

What's today's lesson? Maybe two things. (1) If you need to determine how much trust G gives a particular domain, watch how quickly Google does (or doesn't) index a lot of new pages on that domain. (2) When you launch, launch with some nice trusted links, it'll get you indexed and "somewhat trusted" status, and will start your domain's "linkage history file" off on a good note.

Tips For Increasing Search Engine Traffic

Readers, I could try to paraphrase it all here but it's better to read all of what Nick has to say right here.  Great read.

Garner More Links & Viral Traffic w/ Killer Post Titles

If Brian Clark's CopyBlogger is not on your RSS reader yet, it should be.  Brian's recent article gives you tips on how to affectively write a "how to" post that could garner you mega links and traffic.  By focusing on the benefits to your readers (weak attempt by me in this post title) you can do just that.  Check out his article for the details.

Get Your Daily Barry Fix

I think we have enough "news roundup" SEO blogs around. At least, if you ever take a look at Patrick's Bloglines, I'm not sure how he's able to ever stop reading! (I think he must 'skim' a lot).

Anyway, in my opinion the more enjoyable SEO blogs are those with a bit of personality & gossip. Well you can add a new "fun one" to your Bloglines, Cartoon Barry tracks the hijinks of none other than Mr. Barry Schwarz. The new blog links to his writings from Roundtable and SEWBlog, and also touches on issues such as his adventures in mazelink Ikea, a typical day and plans on posting baby pictures (well, to my knowledge, there's no baby yet).

** update: Barry confirms there's no baby on the way

90% of Japanese bloggers will like ReviewMe

Found on Multilingual Search:
A blog service provider, Hot Link announced the results of blog/SNS usage survey in Japan...
66.0% answered that they would write product/service reviews for rewards (products and/or money) if they receive no pressure to write good reviews from the company. 28.2% answered that they would write the reviews even if they are pressure to write only the good reviews.
Maybe we're in the wrong geographic market. ReviewMe.co.jp anyone? ;-)

Who Will Be At SES San Jose?

Will any LBB readers be down at SES San Jose August 7-10?  Text Link Ads will have a booth, also Andy and I will both be speaking at the show.  Let us know who is going down to the show and hoping we can catch up in person.