WebProNews

Thanks for the great information. Knoll was good for SEO and then they closed it up so its now more of a social site.

Google try to tell us that they don't manipulate rankings at all and all is down to their amazing algorithm. Yet when you read this you realise that all may not be what it seems.  If Google will manipulate rankings for the sake of their own stuff but claim not be influenced in any way yet clearly are, at what point do surfers start to lose faith in the search engine?

 Tanzanite

Good topic.  I question some of your skeptism to the white-hat legitamacy of Google.

"Knol isn't supposed to have a high PageRank yet, but Google may be giving its house resource a little algorithmic love behind the scenes."

I don't suspect that anything was manipulated.  Indeed the PageRank value is still n/a (0).  Keep in mind, however, that the PR rating publicly exposed is not the actual value, but a significantly delayed report.

  Google has always done a good job identifying new sites that have true organic information; Knol was designed to do just that.  I wouldn't be surprised to find several knol articles with high ranking since the site has great momentum; consistent with a strong news source.

  The main Knol site, however, is not even ranking well.  A Google search for knol shows several other results before knol.google.com, which is in position 5.

Regarding the copywrite issue.  This will be interesting to see play out.  First, keep in mind that the duplicate content detection runs as a separate process and can take months if it is identified as such.   Nevertheless, once the article is posted, if it is well accepted and commented on, the page would then posses unique attributes that might make it more useful than the original published page.

Altogether, Google has taken it upon itself to create a landscape somewhere between wikipedia-blogger-digg.  While the Knol team would love to see massive community uptake and creation of awesome content they certainly couldn't guarantee it.  I doubt for even a moment that the Google search team made an their first hard-coded exception for a rather minimal terrirorial expansion.

David Rodecker

Founder & CTO, RelevantAds

“getting local business online"

drodecker@relevantads.com

direct: 714.450.9237

888.8-RELEVANT

Well, it is quite simply because it is Google doing the legwork here in terms of Knol that it will be difficult to any other website to challenge it. Let's face it, it is their search engine and they can do what they want within reason.

My sense is that Knol is a hodge podge article directory right now. With the right structure and integrity it could grow large.

Because it can server its own ads, I am absolutely certain it will achieve high rankings.

One thing that everyone (Danny Sullivan included) is missing is this:  the vast bulk of content on Knol is not being indexed by Google! 

Oh sure, Danny's article, and a few of the front-page, pre-loaded knols are showing up in ordinary search results.  But try posting a knol of your own, and then looking for it in search results with, say, an exact phrase search.  Nada!  It just ain't there.

I've done a small experiment of my own, and I'd say that more than 90% of knol is being held back from Google's (and Yahoo's and everyone else's) search results.  If you want to see it, it's here: 

http://web-owls.com/2008/07/29/google-knol-the-new-invisible-web/

 If this keeps up, Knol isn't going to be much of a threat to Wikipedia, or any other site for that matter.

And Google's enticement of earning Adsense income won't mean a heck of a lot to Knol articles that don't show up in searches, and don't get any traffic.

Thanks for listening.

David

Google as usual wants its version of everything on net, and wikipedia was one that had lot of reputaion, so knol should eventually gain more popularity just like any other product of google (gmail, orkut) did. I am starting my Knol soon

I agree with the statement that we should all boycot google. Far as I am concerened, it should be blocked at the firewall just like porn sites are. It was great until they started to copy other sites out there and as they are bigger, they are normally more sucessful. When they come up with an original idea, then fine.

What with Google's own YouTube, news items from Google's own news aggregator, shopping sites from Google's own froogle, images from Google's own image search and now Knol taking up the top spots in Google search listings will there be any room for non Google websites in the first search engine results page?!

Oh wait, blogger occasionally appears...

<I now spontaneously combust in a shower of cynicism>

I do not know about other search engines but I hate Ask .Com and sometimes when I am on google it throws me over to Ask.com and it is the worst search engine I have ever come across I do not know what to do about getting rid of Ask.com if you put apples it would give your everything starting with a A but not apples. it is driving me crazy. hope google soon drops Ask. or a lot of us will be looking for other searche engines. I wonder how many other people are having the same trouble.

i think it's another attempt from Google to take over the world, just like Microsoft copies everything and makes it better, ICQ  -> MSN Messenger. the big G is doing exactly the same Knol = Wikipedia

Another thing that may be putting knol ahead of other old search pages is that fact that it is a subdomain of google.com which as we all know has huge pagerank, does this mean that subdomains are considered part of it's parent domain, and some ranking goes into it from the parent?

Does it really matter and if so do you think we say willsway google.

Me thinks not

Mick

This is complete bull.  If google knows that knol has been spammed with a duplicate of content existing elsewhere on the web, it should treat the knol piece as it does any other piece of duplicate junk ... give it the gray bar page rank (less than zero).  It is supposed to be impossible for these regurgitations to out rank their older parents.

For instance, I have written a number of book reviews on my blog that have a moderate amount traffic.  I discovered that others were copying and re-posting my reviews on other web sites complete with my name.  At first it pissed me off but, on reconsideration, let it slide because google will always rank my blog first for this material.  What if my stuff gets copied and pasted to a knol?  This is a serious issue IMHO.

...except its own.

[

"Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm," said Wall.

"Google knows the content is duplicate, and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source."

]

I have been b&tch&ng about this for 2 years now.  They can post whatever BS that they want on their webmaster blog, but Google can't figure out what is the original and what is the duplicate.  Google is absolutely horrible at it.  This is a prime example, and the smaller the site, the easier it is to get royally screwed by copied content. 

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this is just a way to drive up advertising profits.  Small to mid-size sites that find themselves tossed from Google will buy more advertising if they find they don't rank.  I heartily encourage people to use some other ad network and boycott Google, especially if your loss in rankings is due to content theft.

Thanks for pointing this out.  The more noise that is made about how Google boosts its own sites in its supposedly "fair" search results, and the more noise that is made about how bad it is at determining the original source, the more public pressure will be on them to fix it.

Its results are heavily biased in favor of its own sites, big corporations, and the very spammers it keeps trying to stop.

I wrote an article also, just to see if there was any benefit to rankings. I don't see any. With all us SEO people, we may have flooded Knol and confused Google's mission.

I went and looked at a few articles and didn't see anything spectular.  Also, there wasn't a resource box like an article directory may have, but of course they aren't trying to be an article directory.

I see where you can add some references and at least in the body you can have external links, but not really clear how it will help.  It seems like the article would look really spammy if you stuffed it full of deep links to your site's internal pages. 

The author section didn't appear to allow for external links.

Thoughts?