Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I can't confirm that .org has more weight than .com overall. There are a particular group of sites that I've been watching over the past 4 months. Those sites have PR7 and above. When performing backwards links checks, there is a high number of .org sites that link to these properties. Those .org sites also have high PR.
In theory, you would think that .org would have a little more weight than .com depending on the industry. I know of a site right now that has PR9 and their incoming links are from 90% .org sites, that is who their customers are. There are approximately 25 incoming links to that PR9 site, most are coming from PR7 and PR8 .org sites.
I think what you will find though, is that where .orgs are being used appropriately, ie, they are sites for organisations, as opposed to companies or commercial ventures, they have a high interest level for a wider range of sites: commercial sites do not perceive them as competition for a dollar and are more likely to link to them as they often provide good content and improve the customer’s experience, and Joe Average home page owner is likely to link to them because they may directly represent a hobby or whatever for him. Think about it – how many personal home pages do you see with links like “this is my favorite shoe shop” versus “this is a site about orienteering, which is a hobby I enjoy”.
On that basis, a .org used appropriately will gain a high PR through exactly the same method as any other page – number of links. We probably won’t see the half of it because hundreds or thousands of those links may be from very low PR personal home pages which won’t show on a backlinks search, but it all adds up.
Having gained that high PR, then of course that link from the .org to you is worth more than from a lower PR .com domain… but I don’t think it is worth more than a link from a .com with the same PR.
When Google started, they started by indexing most of the college sites on the net. That led to those being the basis for the early pagerank calcs.
