Recently a number of well known SEO blogs have been talking about Black Hole SEO. In this post I want to take a look at the points raised and explain why I don’t think it’s a viable strategy for most websites.
Quadszilla describes Black Hole SEO as:
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.
Sites such as TechCrunch use the technique very intelligently – they link both internally and externally. This means they keep bloggers and startups happy by giving a live link and they get good rankings for sites in the network such as CrunchBase.
If you are an authority site then linking to sites in your network rather than external sites is sometimes a good strategy but the problem arises when less experienced webmasters read about Black Hole SEO and think it is a viable strategy.
Unless your site is already a massive authority site then stopping linking is a bad idea. As a webmaster nothing annoys me more than people who reference me or my clients without linking. It’s just bad manners. I remember people who don’t link and make a point of not linking to them in the future. I’m sure some people go even further and bury their stories on social sites.
Most astronomical black holes form when a star collapses. If the star is more than 3 times the mass of the Sun it forms a black hole, otherwise it becomes a neutron star or white dwarf.
The point is that people don’t like Black Hole sites and they won’t want to link to them. So cutting off your outgoing links before you reach critical mass will inhibit your chances of actually achieving Black Hole status.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
For IT or tech-related related sites this totally makes sense, but there are industries where webmasters are one-man bands and aren’t particularly knowledgeable of such things so it’s easy to get away with. I don’t advocate nofollow’s either but I can see why people like to think it’s ‘good SEO practice’.
An interesting point raised by Aaron Wall on black holes, is that ultimately the algorithms may be reworked in response to this mismatch and reduce the weight of inbound links, but until a viable alternative is found to highlight a website’s trust-factor it’s not going to happen soon which goes back to the first point of the apparent black-hole…
I don’t want to say it but I feel I have to: Black holes suck.
I got my industry start working for a site that at the time had a toolbar PR of 8 yet they refused to allow us to add links to useful sites on the grounds that it would bleed PR (rather than the more logical worry that users would follow the free links rather than click on affiliate links or Adsense).
I have always found the idea of this non-sensical because the WWW is called a “web” for a reason and outbound links give context to your content just as much as inbound links give weight to your pages.
Plus, it’s a lot easier to reclaim a user who has followed a link, found the information and backpaged, than to reclaim a user who has gone back to a search engine to look for the original source of information if you haven’t provided a link.
This topic is so timely. Back here in OZ. The big media networks are blatantly doing the same thing. They rarely link out when discussing a story. I feel that as the net develops here in OZ such a strategy will ultimately be fatal.
All it takes is for a movement to develop amongst the blogging community, not to link out to stories by this big fish and over time, they will feel the pinch.
You Gotta Give Love to Get Love!
I very much agree with what Mindy (Comment #3) has mentioned …
iv people fell into the black hole could they get out or still live. xx
ok
One thing worse than black holes is stuffing advertising for so-called ’search engine optimisation’ in the middle of Google search results. SEO (What? Do any so-called SEO companies optimise a /search engine/? No…) is a self-referential, irrelevant industry, off little use in the world of decent search engines, and of little interest to anyone other than itself and the poor web customers who believe they are paying for more than the emperor’s new clothes.
@A proper computer user
I understand that you might not ‘get’ what we do. But only in the sense that I don’t get why people eat Marmite. I don’t worry about it, and I don’t think you should either. Our clients see the metrics, the conversions, the sales, the value (etc) and continue to employ our services – it’s really that simple.
To me, Marmite eaters are odd, are odder than odd in fact, but I can honestly promise you that I have never been onto one of their ‘I love Marmite‘ websites and said “you are odder than odd” just because I felt like it. I just have to respect that they wish to employ the services of Marmite (albeit to leave their mouths smelling bad for hours on end!) as our clients wish us to increase volumes of relevant search traffic.
I want to ask whether you are a Marmite eater, but I won’t in case it seems rude.
And finally, SEO….optimising websites for search engines, not to ‘optimise a search engine’…Self-referential, maybe, irrelevance, nah!
Excellent post. Black holes are worse than death stars. Long live Luke Skywalker.
More comments from Manly SydneyHi nice and interesting post. Thankyou.
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