A link from a .gov domain – like striking gold?

Recently, Google has been releasing more information about the factors that go into ranking on its platform.

For nearly as long as search engines have been around, links have been used to help them work out how trustworthy your website really is. The types of websites that link to your website tell search engines a lot about your business, including your business’s network and its relevance to your industry.

That means any government websites linking to you could be particularly useful for search engine optimisation (SEO).

Why?

Since government websites publish important information like official statistics and reports, search engines trust these websites due to the painstaking research and checks done before anything is published on them.

Government websites have high authority, so this will help to increase your website’s authority, but bear in mind that this only happens when the link from the government website is a follow link.

What is a follow link?

This is a link that enables search engines and crawlers to click on the links in a website in order to see the websites being to.

If a website sets links to “no follow” this means that search engines and crawlers are unable to click through to your domain meaning that your website will more than likely not get any authority from the website linking to you.

To conclude, having a link from a government website can help your website to rank, but government links are not more powerful than any other link you may get from other websites. Instead of focusing on getting links from a government website, the best strategy is to produce content that is authoritative, trustworthy and relevant to your website.

At Engage Web, we offer SEO services to help grow your business through writing relevant content for your website and helping it gain backlinks that build trust. To find out more, have a chat with our team today.

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Jonathon Roberts

Jonathon lives and breathes marketing, boasting a degree in Business Management and Marketing Management and a diverse list of experiences both professional and voluntary. Having grown up in the thick of the digital and social media age, he has been quick to dive into online marketing and search engine optimisation in his career and spare time, spanning such fields as academics, local business and sport.

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