As promised, today we’ll go over some more of the trends in Black holes and what steps you can take to create or take advantage of their growing dominance in the SERPs.

First, the micro niche site is dying. Why build a site dedicated to (for example) bee-keeping, set theory, Jainism, or even Salvia Divinorum when right off the bat you’re conceding 43% of your Google traffic to a black hole?

Behold! The size advantage. Today, you are far better off running one or two mega sites than 10 or 100 niche sites. The last remaining vestige of an SEO advantage for running a specialized site is in a name match in the domain name. It’s like the specialty store vs. Wal-Mart all over again. Who do you think’s gonna win this one?

Look for social media sites (Digg, Twitter, del.icio.us . . . etc) to evolve into “everything for everyone” sites. The Twitterpedia, del.icio.us catering listings, and Digg shopping section will arrive shortly after their management’s realize just how much they can dominate the SERPs across every conceivable profitable niche. Answers.com, about.com, and the wikipedia are all examples that are close, but aren’t being nearly as aggressive as they could be.

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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.

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Popularity: 13% [?]