SEO Black Hat: SEO Blog and Private Forum

Black Hole SEO employs a technique that causes the normal laws of Google Physics to break down. Link juice flows into a massive body, but can never escape. When employed on a massive body, it tends to dominate the SERPs.

A black hole site is created when an tier 1 authority site ceases to link out to other sites. If a reference is needed, the information is rewritten and a reference page is created within the black hole. All (or virtually all) external links on the site are made nofollow.

The first example of a black hole site was the wikipedia. The internal links formed a network that passed link juice from one page to another allowing obscure articles with no external links to rank number 1 in the SERPs. This #1 ranking begets natural links from external links. When a webizen wants a quick reference, they consult Google and link to one of the top results. This causes more link juice to flow into the black hole and the body’s trust becomes more and more massive over time.

1. Link juice flows in, but it can never escape.
2. External Sites lose link juice at the expense of the black hole.
3. The relative link juice mass of the black hole expands exponentially.

Other Google Physicists realize what is happening and are now modeling their sites and networks to become black holes as well. One example of a burgeoning black holes is The New York Times. They will not link out even when relevant to the article. All links in any of their articles will go to a “Times Topics” page.

Business Week is following suit and their practices will soon mirror the New York Time’s. However, because Business Week is not yet massive enough, they cannot yet be classified as a black hole.

For massive sites with a tier one level of Google trust, there is virtually no benefit to linking to any external sites without a link condom. That whole “link out to authority sites” mantra of yesteryear’s SEOs does not apply to black holes.

We could debate how Google could fix this problem, but that’s not the focus of this site. This site is about how to become one of those who dominate in the SERPs regardless of how Google chooses to determine who “deserves” to rank.

The dynamics of Google’s current algorithm tend to create black holes. The homogeneous nature of the SERPs will only become more pervasive over time. In the near future, expect to see the same pool of 40 or so black holes account for ~70% of all top 10 results.

Do you want to have one (or more) of those 40 black holes?

My next post will discuss how to create your own black hole - it’s not quite as easy as you might expect but it can be done. Stay tuned . . .

Tagged: google |

There’s long been talk in the SEO community about seeking links from .edu sites. Some have argued that the links are better than non .edu links just by virtue of the TLD while others contended that what is important is that .edu sites naturally have trust rank because of all the backlinks they receive.

Up until now, we really didn’t know for certain who is right.

However, a search I did this morning indicates that Google is intrinsically trusting and placing more weight on citations from scholarly articles. After all, why track the information if they are not going to use it to rank results?

Here’s a screenshot from the search:

Additionally, Google is attempting to track by Author.

Q: Will this lead to Google inherently trusting and ranking one author from a site over another?

A: Almost certainly yes.

Why limit ranking to trust by site and/or page? It would certainly be more valuable to be able to determine who authored an article than merely where that article is published. Just as in the print world, while a magazine or newspaper may be popular, various authors have differing degrees of worth, value, popularity, and trust.

Q: So what should I do now?

A: Develop contacts, procedures and applications for the procurement of scholar citations. By hook or by crook, get scholarly citations to your websites and build the trust of your site’s authors.

Tagged: google |