Why do .edu and .gov enjoy higher page ranks?

I have seen many people discussing on why do they get higher page ranks or why does every search engine get them on the top of their searches for no reason. I understand there are many good things inside it, although there are many still developing and still they are put into the top searches in no time.

Why is it so ? What is so good about those domain TLD's ? And where do you really register them at ?

Not sure I always wondered that myself... i think it just has to do with the fact that they are authority sites so yeild higher value then others.

Very few registrar's provide out .edu domains but they aren't really limited to the authorities. You can probably get one but by paying high enough for it.

.edu domains are give to education organizations only so google thinks that they are more important and natural sites

I thing .edu and .gove domains belogs to institutions and ministry.. So the equality of content will be always better and always optimized.. By default they may have too much visitors and natural linking

Its because so many people link to .edu and .gov.

Lets think about this - lets say that New York city has 100,000 people graduate high school in a single year. Then says say that 1% join myspace and link back to their high school. That is 10,000 backlinks to that high school just from myspace.

google takes those sites differently and categorize them for governmental and educational so they automatically got higher rank.

Main reason is because .edu and .gov domains cannot just be registered by some unknown fella and therefore the trust factor from such domain sites are higher.

I never looked at it from that view before. :tongue: Thanks.

Yeah that was right, good analogy there Kev and not only that its because they are always those authority sites and search engine thinks that they are not belong to the spam group that can pollute them.

.edu domain is for education and .gov is for government so google give them high importance and crawl them separately and rank them separately

I think .edu and .gov sites might be taken as authority sites and thus enjoy higher PR. But I think a such domain would not be suitable for a business site though building backlinks from such domains might be very helpful in our sites's PR.

It is widely accepted that .edu and .gov backlinks carry a larger weight for search engine algorithms, probably because they have been online for long or they have become recognized as a source for good and relevant content as we know relevance is exactly what search engines are looking to provide their users.

.edu links have good credibility courtesy of Google, so they get more 'weight' when backlinks are being placed there.

no they don't have higher page rank. Their PR improve like any other site's.
The only thing is that there are big authority sites linking to them. For example recently I bought a domain name. It is PR4 even though it was only one backlink, but that backlink is from an authority .gov site.

google trust them ... PR is nothing

They are more reputable and trusted unlike .com and .net sites. The information they give to the reader is merely behind promotion and they focus more on public concerns and issues.

A popular belief among the SEO community is that links from .edu or US gov domains carry lot of weight in the eyes of search engines and hence, if any of these ‘trusted’ sites link to your own site, your search rankings get a boost.
Well, that may just be another myth as Google made their stand extremely clear on this during the Webmaster chat session.

Some edu or gov websites have PR6 or more, and have no backlinks. Why to create backlinks for edu websites? LOL

I think that the quality of the content is why google like them so much.

I have read on an article that .edu and .gov sites can boost you website search ranking because they are authority sites which google counts..