.gov and .edu free directories?

[Manu]

Uh, yeah, that was my point. They have an entry in the results page for the site, which is how I got the idea of joining and bookmarking with that site. It does not seem very valid to me that one bookmark on a site should increase your site's page strength. That seems like giving a single site too much weight in their determination factors. The one bookmark on a social bookmarking site might influence their ranking, but I doubt it is going to influence Google's opinion one way or another about one's site; or Yahoo; or MSN. So, what is the point of giving that much weight to a social bookmarking site? And does Technorati really have that much weight?

I agree with you menard that they should not have given weight to bookmark from a single website. But, as I can see the the popularity of a site in del.icio.us also matters other than just getting listed there. I think they should have considered results from all/imp social bookmarking sites. http://del.icio.us/ was some time ago acquired by Yahoo and some believe that popularity of a website in del.icio.us reflects in its ranking on yahoo search results. I am however not sure on this. There is another breed of search algorithm coming up in future in which search engines will rank sites with the help of the user IMO and social bookmarking sites can play their part in it. Wikipedia has also announced its new human powered search engine wikiseek. Technorati and social bookmarking sites are an estimate of what is hot, what is not happenings on the Internet. I think technorati helps in determining the Importance/Visibility of a website rather than seo weight.

[Menard]

Technorati and social bookmarking sites are an estimate of what is hot, what is not happenings on the Internet. I think technorati helps in determining the Importance/Visibility of a website rather than seo weight.

With Technorati, and other such sites, their entire focus is on blogs. Giving such sites more weight than what directories get (and directories will list most types of sites), IMO, creates an imbalance in judging the importance of a site. Many webmasters have their own personal sites filled with their ideas, favorite things, collections, etc,; what makes someone's overly long and boring random thoughts any more important? Content is important on the web and blogs are filled with content, as well are other sites, but bots can't distinguish between good and poor quality content, IMO.

[Andy]

Social bookmarking sites have a bias towards bloggers and journalists I suspect since ordinary surfers just use search engines to find sites. There is definately a social circle of people that revolve around the social bookmarking scene to generate traffic and ranking for their sites. I have used technorati tags myself since it does get your site link on the Technorati site very easily and quickly.

People that use popular blogging methods to publish to the web may have an advantage over personal site publishers that code their own sites since the personal site publishers may not be structuring their code in the best way to please the search engines. For example, blogs tend to liberally link out to relevant content on other sites, the navigation is automatically generated so all the pages link together without any broken links, rss feeds are automatically generated and the posts are time-stamped. Also, comments from readers can automatically add fresh original and related content.

I still like to think that it is better to make your own original sites though since you can streamline your code more than a blog and make it more unique. The main difficulty is maintaining the navigation structure as the site grows so all the pages are easily navigateable and found by search engines. I know that site maps can help but they should not really be necessary IMHO.

What is needed is easy and affordable web publishing tools that allow people to publish and maintain web sites as easily as posting to blogs.

[Menard]

I had not considered this possibility, but some .gov and .edu sites are running blogs as well and may allow someone to post a comment on the blog with a link included in their username.

One such blog is here: http://www.hawaii.gov/lrb/libblog/

The links are 'no follow', but at least it's a link.

Anybody else have any blogs on .gov or .edu domains they would like to share?

[Manu]

I know a directory on .edu

However, they charge for the link.

Pm me to know the url of the directory.

[Andy]

You could work a reverse strategy i.e. instead of trying to place a link on their site you could aim to get them linking to you.

For example, find a .edu or .gov site and support it's content in a way that may want them to link to your site as a useful resource for their readers. For example a guide to specialist schools. Once you have the resource site in place you could email the webmaster to ask them what they think about your site for example and suggest they may want to list it in their resource links.

One of my web pages got linked to from a Wikipedia editor who was using one of my online tools. Natural links like this are what Google likes best.

[Menard]

I found some more resources for getting both .gov and .edu links to your site.

The Library of Congress has its own blog: http://www.loc.gov/blog/

Doing a Google search for gov blog will bring up various blogs for senators and representatives as well.


My .edu blog: http://blogs.adison.edu/menard/

Okay, not a lot going on there right now, but keep it for reference.

The site has several blogs to which you can post with a link to your site; you can find several blogs here: http://blogs.adison.edu/

[Andy]

There is no Google PR on the http://blogs.adison.edu/ url. Are you sure it is a source of good traffic?

[Menard]

It was recently re-invigorated as a site, as the domain had been sitting dormant for a while. There has been a trade-off with other webmasters for links on sites and in forum sigs (check mine), which is how I got my blog. This is more of a source for getting a .edu backlink than for traffic, at this point. I don't have any idea what kind of rank is in the works for the domain, but the rate at which backlinks are growing for it is very good.