One of the main items anyone can do to improve the rankings in the search engines is to build up incoming links. There has always been a discussion on how different links are counted. One of the main items that most people talk about is getting links on .edu or .gov sites as the holy grail of link building.
This is discussed on marketing forums all over the net and most people believe these links carry some sort of additional authority. Links from social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook are normally looked at as lower quality links than ones from sites such as government sites or education universities.
I guess this comes from the notion that its a lot easier to create a new profile on a social site and fill it up with links to your site than it is to obtian a link from your local college. But do these really make a difference.
Well according to Matt Cutts from Google, it does not matter. They are looking for a variety of links and while they may give more rank for a page coming from a page with a higher page rank, the actual url really plays no part. A follow link is a follow link. The higher the page rank of the linking page the more valuable it is. Seems like a good reason to build links to your profile pages on sites that are not no follow on your social networking sites.
Here is the video on this from Matt’s own mouth, so you can make up your own mind as to whether you believe him.
So what are your thoughts is Matt putting out disinformation? or do you believe what he says about the domain extension not having anything to do with the assignment of weight to a particular link?
