Last week I came across an interesting post on the SEO Black Hat blog that talked about black holes. No, not the astronomy ones, but the SEO ones! Quoting the article:
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.
As you probably guessed, the most famous example of an SEO black hole is Wikipedia. The problem is that many mainstream websites are following the same route (e.g., NY Times, Business Week). Even some popular blogs — which we would expect to have more willingness to pass the link love — are starting to use those black hole techniques to avoid linking out as often as possible (e.g., TechCrunch with their “Company Profile” pages).
The problem with this pattern is that it reinforces that popularity of the big guys, while making it harder for the small kids to play. Ever heard the saying “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”?
On a follow-up post, Quadszilla claims that this phenomenon could put a bane on the “mini niche websites” strategy. That is, you would be better off trying to create 1 or 2 mega websites rather than trying to create 100 mini niche websites.
Now this is certainly a controversial issue, because as of today you still have hundreds (if not thousands) of webmasters and online marketers that swear by the efficiency and profitability of creating mini niche websites.
Personally I stand on the fence here. I think that both strategies could work, and both have advantages and disadvantages. In fact I employ both of them. I have a couple of large websites (Daily Blog Tips being one of them), but I also develop mini niche websites from time to time.
But what about you? Do you agree with Quadszilla that mini niche websites are on the way out? Or do you think that this online strategy will still be working years down the road? Speak your mind!
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About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
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