Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do .ac.uk (UK education / university sites) count in the same way as .edu backlinks
-
With regards to link trust are backlinks from .ac.uk (wiki on .ac.uk) count in the same way as .edu backlinks ?
-
Longtime back Wil Reynolds discuss in one of his presentation that .EDU domains are same as any other normal domains. The reason why they become so important is that most people and reputable website easily link to .EDU or .GOV websites, which make themselves reputable with time.
But, at its core, saying that just because one domain s .EDU it will be respectable automatically, is not true.
So no matter if the URL contain .EDU extension or not, you should look into their link profile and see if the link profile is clean and valuable, you should consider getting a link from them like you would have done for .EDU website.
Just a thought!
-
Hi there!
tldr; Yes educational and governmental links are the same as any other link.
SEO has lot of myth, some came out of truth (because it worked some long ago) and some came out of the conspirational mind of tome people (sometimes triggered just to create engaging content).
My personal experiments, tells that educational and governmental links do not carry more "juice" than any other backlinks.
I found that many people speak about those links as TOO VALUABLE because they are extremely hard to get. Guess what? Any extremely valuable link is also really hard to get.I advise everyone that come across this topic, to focus their efforts in making the site great, not in finding impossible links that "promise" great result.
Hope I've cleared your doubts.
Best luck.
GR. -
Hi There,
First up, as per Matt Cutts, google will rank the most relevant results regardless of the domain name and extension. This is how they treat the Domain extension whether TLD or SLD for it's own ranking.
Now, coming to your question, I have no data to back my hypothesis but this URL has what my own hypothesis is all about. You should focus on getting the right backlinks that are relevant for your own website in terms of getting target traffic and conversion. Essentially, instead of focusing on domain name extension , focus on the right domain that would bring you results.
I hope this helps, let me know if you have further questions.
Regards,
Vijay
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Backlinks from translated content
Hello, We have quite a few articles "out there" that give us backlinks. We were thinking of also translating the content and submitting it to local content websites, so it can provide us with more backlinks. The main questions here, will this content be recognized as the same content as the English version? Also, being in another language, some of the anchor text might not hit the English keyword. Not sure how Google sees it. Any advise on the matter? thx!!
Link Building | | PangeaLangs0 -
Best way to check/find lost links?
Hi all As everyone, we have seen a decrease of domain authority and external links during the last months. with open site Rand is explaining the reason in this in this post, but I still would like to have a look to the links that in theory I have lost during the last months. I thought Majestic was the best option but I have been trying to get the info and I see nothing clear. When I download the fresh or history links, I only see links that are live (in theory, because in history I get a lot not existing but I can not see it without a manual check). The option of lost links is just giving me 1000 links per day, but after downloading some and checking I see that this lost link report is showing me links that are working (but it looks that majestic couldn't access when they did the crawling and show them as lost). Also the numbers of lost links are totally different if you use fresh or historic... Anyone could recommend me a good way to find out links that I really lost? Thanks
Link Building | | AutoEurope1 -
Spammy no follow backlinks - what should I do?
There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche. It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing. They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page. The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text. The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart). The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords. There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site. Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites. Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop. ???
Link Building | | johnohara0 -
Web Designers and SEOs using backlinks from client sites
What are your thoughts on SEOs and web designers putting their own links in the footers of client sites. For the sake of argument, lets assume that the client is happy for the link to be there. I'm referring to the SEO merits of the link being there from an 'irrelevant' website. My belief is that this goes against what Google is looking for and that these are irrelevant links and likely to be picked up and penalised. That's what I believe! However, I see lots of sites offering SEO services that have dofollow links from their client sites, using exact match anchor text and they are all ranking highly. Is it just a matter of time before Google sniffs them out and penalises them for it? Or should I be going through my client sites and adding myself a dofollow link in the footer? (with their permission of course). The highest ranking sites in any UK city do this. If you search SEO Manchester, SEO Leeds etc and find the top ranking sites and check them out on opensite explorer, they are all using a disproportionate amount of dofollow backlinks form client sites.
Link Building | | littlesthobo0 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Why do we need proxy to so Backlinks?
Does Google knows the IP addresses that the backlinks are created from? if i create 200 backlinks for my site without proxies will google ban my site because it will look like i a the one who create all the backlinks? May i ask how many proxies do you guys need to create around 200 backlinks per day? If i already use the proxies today Can i use the same set of proxies to create backlinks tomorrow? THanks
Link Building | | locoto00071 -
Changing backlinks anchor text
Hi, I've read a few blog post here that suggests the strength of building links using your brand as an anchor text. This supposedly gives the site authority. Currently a chunck of the back links to my homepage are on generic terms i'm trying to rank for which doesn't seem to be working very well. I was thinking of contacting the various webmasters to change the anchor text to that of the site brand name but wondering if this will signal a manipulation of links to the search engines and potentially could be flagged as paid links? Has anybody done this before and what is the danger of doing this? Thanks Duke
Link Building | | clickangel0 -
How important are edu and gov backlinks?
I have heard that edu and gov backlinks are important but how so in a niche area like mine - real estate? Perhaps I am missing the point but I do not see how either type of site would ever backlink to a commercial real estate entity. If these are that important in theory, are they obtainable in practice?
Link Building | | casper4340