James have previously tested linking out to various types of domain/sites. Previous tests have provided a comparison between .gov and .org. He wanted to see if linking out to .gov would influence rank on its own.
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This is a James Goldsmith test. You've seen these tests before. We used various sites, various types of sites, various domains, etc. The test setup is the same. He's using ten test pages. I'm going to skip a lot of this, you can read it inside of the PDF yourself. But most of this is just images to show the progression of the dates and where the ranking went. You can see that it’s pretty much stayed the same.
So the linking out to a government test or a government domain in and of itself is pretty useless. Could there be some applications where you link out and then you put this in the schema as a sameAs or a mentions? I'm going to have to say as a hint that yes, that will help. You just need to play around with these and combine it up. But in and of itself, people tell you should link out to .govs and not .orgs or .orgs and not .govs but that’s not true. That's good to know, so thank you James for that test.
