One of the things webmasters try to do with very little success is to acquire high quality back links from web sites with a .gov or .edu extension. Getting links from these types of sites is very difficult because only reputable government or education organizations can register a .gov or .edu domain name, and these organizations tend to link to other equally reputable web sites. Hence, the quality of those backlinks from .gov and .edu are likely to be higher than that of those links from other regular web sites.
There is a debate on whether search engines actually award more value to back links coming from .gov or .edu web sites in terms of page rank and search engine rankings. Recently Matt Cutts from Google released a comment about .gov and .edu back links, and indicated that there is no preferential treatment for those back links currently done by Google.
Due to their high credibility, still many webmasters try to come up with ideas on how to acquire back links belonging to .gov and .edu domains. These reputable web sites hardly ever sell links, and when they do sell them, you can expect to pay upwards of $100 or $200 per month per link and even more if the page rank of such a web site is high or the site receives a lot of traffic.
There is one way to get .edu and .gov links relatively easily and quickly at no cost. This is through forum signatures. There are many .edu and .gov web forums that just about anybody can sign up at. All you have to do is to register at one of these many forums hosted in .gov and .edu domains and make a few (non-spammy) posts. Then put a link in your signature that goes to your web sites and you instantly have multiple back links to your sites from a .gov or .edu web site. This is one legitimate way to get links from all regulated extensions where not everybody can register a domain name.
