Knol: Google Coins A New Word

A knol is more than a unit of knowledge. Once people begin creating these in earnest, they should become a unit of currency for Google, too.

Udi Manber posted about the knol at the official Google blog. The knol represents part of the solution to the challenge posed by Google’s ruling triumvirate to "find a way to help people share their knowledge."

We’ll never know if some wiseass Googler suggested "posting more links to Blogger.com" as a quick and easy solution. Shame, really.

Rather than blogging, which nearly everyone does these days, don’tcha know, Google plans to roll out a new free tool called a knol. "Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," said Manber.

"Move over Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Mahalo, and Squidoo," Danny Sullivan said, summarizing knol in one economical sentence.

The longer definition goes like this. Google opened up knol to a select group of invitees, to create content that will be nicely presented and well-organized. Google’s not going to edit anything, either:

We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write.

See what Google did there? "Anyone will be free to write." It left out a couple of words at the end, which we think are "for free."

In the aesthetically pleasing screenshot Google provides as a sample of a knol, there is a familiar AdSense block, with the caption, "The author of this Knol does not endorse these ads." Authors can share in this revenue if they want ads displayed.

But don’t worry! Google wants to disseminate the writer’s content as widely as possible. Any other search engine, as in the ones that get the roughly 35 percent of search market share in the US that Google doesn’t absorb, can index these knols to their heart’s content.

We understand Silicon Valley operates in something of an insular fashion. Valleys are like that. But they must be pretty blinkered at the Googleplex if they think writers haven’t noticed the writers strike taking place in Hollywood.

Writers want to be paid, not with easy to use tools and nicely formatted pages. Show us the money Google. Then we can talk about units of knowledge.

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This article does not reference Google Toolbar PageRank in any way

First of all you are going to need to do a little homework.

Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts

The Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts was truly exceptional and revealed a number of gotchas that for some reason continue to be circulated.

Key takeaways

Matt Cutts: … Now, robots.txt says you are not allowed to crawl a page, and Google therefore does not crawl pages that are forbidden in robots.txt. However, they can accrue PageRank, and they can be returned in our search results.

Matt Cutts: … So, with robots.txt for good reasons we’ve shown the reference even if we can’t crawl it, whereas if we crawl a page and find a Meta tag that says NoIndex, we won’t even return that page. For better or for worse that’s the decision that we’ve made. I believe Yahoo and Microsoft might handle NoIndex slightly differently which is little unfortunate, but everybody gets to choose how they want to handle different tags.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won’t be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn’t make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

I have just provided a couple of highlights, I am not attempting to replace a need for visiting the site I am citing. This is something I hate seeing, when people take other people’s content and repurpose it, thus making the original article worthless.
There are a few other gotchas in there, I suggest you read it 2 or 3 times to really understand what was said, and what wasn’t said.

Dangling Pages

One of the best descriptions of dangling links is on the Webworkshop site, though they are assuming that links are totally taken out of the equation based on what they quote from the PageRank paper.

"Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly." – extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Alternate interpretation

This is just an aside, as the amount of juice lost to dangling pages currently is hard to determine, and could be handled differently

They are assuming that if page A links to 6 other pages, 5 of them being dangling links, then the website will be treated as only having 2 pages until the end of the calculation.

Whilst I haven’t delved into the maths (and probably couldn’t through lack of information and lack of knowledge), it also seems to me that at the time the pages are taken out of the cyclic calculation, a percentage of the link value can still be taken with them.

Thus though the site for cyclic calculations will be just 2 pages, the link from A to B might only transfer 1/6 of the juice on each cycle.

At the time the original paper was written, Google only had a small proportion of the web indexed due to hardware and operating system restraints.
In modern times they have a lot more indexed, thus a more complex way of handling dangling pages could be possible.

More food for thought, a link to a page that is considered supplemental could be treated as a full link or as a link to a dangling page, or some other variant.

Even more food for thought, a site with multiple interlinked pages with no external links at all could be looked on as a "dangling site".

Ultimately what is important is that dangling pages are a juice leak, though it is difficult to determine exactly how much

Additional Research On Link Juice Flow

I have referenced these works before, and I am just going to keep on referring people to them.

• SEOFastStart by Dan Theis – a good introduction to SEO, and also introduces the ideas of controlling juice around a website – no email signup required
• Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell – a timeless classic as long as PageRank continues to be important – the download page isn’t hidden if you really don’t want to sign up to Michael’s mailing list, but I have been on his list for years.
• Dynamic Linking by Leslie Rhode – A bonus that comes with Revenge of the Mininet

I mentioned these is a comment on SEOmoz recently in a discussion on PageRank, and for some reason my comment received just 2 up votes and one down vote.

I don’t gain in any material way from promoting these free ebooks, though I might gain some goodwill. The main reason I link to them is because they are a superb resource, and it saves me countless hours writing beginners material.

OK, On to some debunking

Blocking Pages With Robots.txt Creates Dangling Pages On The First Tier

In the quoted paragraph above, Matt clearly states that pages blocked with Robots.txt still accumulate juice from the links they receive.

Those pages don’t have any external 2nd tier links that are visible to a ‘bot, thus they are dangling pages.

How much juice they leak depends on how Google currently factor in dangling pages, but Matt himself suggests not to create dangling pages.

If you read any SEO Guide that suggests that the ultimate cure for duplicate content is to block it with robots.txt, I suggest you might want to question the author about dangling pages.

Meta NoIndex Follow Duplicate Content

This is a better solution than using Robots.txt, because it doesn’t create dangling pages. Links on a duplicate content page are still followed, however both internal and external links are followed and thus are leaks, often multiple leaks for the same piece of content when using CMS systems such as WordPress which create site-wide links in the sidebar when using poorly designed themes, plugins, and especially WordPress Widgets.

If you read an article suggesting using Meta Noindex Follow, ask the author how they are controlling external links on duplicate content pages.

Meta NoIndex Nofollow Duplicate Content

If you use Meta Noindex Nofollow, whilst this is handled slightly differently by Google to Robots.txt, as the page won’t appear in search results, it is still a page accumulating Google Juice if you link to it, another dangling page or node.
Second tier leaks from the page won’t leak, but the page as a whole will leak depending on how Google are currently handling dangling pages.

I don’t see people recommending this frequently, but as with Robots.txt, ask the author about dangling pages.

Dynamic Linking & rel="nofollow"

Extensive use of Nofollow and other forms of dynamic linking are the only way to effectively prevent duplicate content pages in some way having a effect on your internal linking structure and juice flow. The Wikipedia page on Nofollow really isn’t correct.

The Dangling Sales Page

To finish I want to give you an example of how a sales page that previously might have benefited from lots of links can easily be turned into a dangling page and effectively discounted from cyclic PageRank calculations.

Sales pages started off just as a single page with no links:-

Despite all the links coming to the site from external sources, this website is a dangling page, thus excluded from iterative PageRank calculations. It might still benefit from anchor text and other factors, but it effectively is not part of Google’s global mesh and passes on no influence.

Add Legal Paperwork And Reciprocal Links Directory:-

A much more structured site, and whilst it gains some benefit from reciprocating links there are 2 factors that are almost universally overlooked.

1. No Longer A Dangling Page – because the site now has external links, it is valid as part of the global ranking calculations. Other pages as mentioned above were previously stating that the amount of juice passed to dangling pages was minimal, so this could be potentially a huge boost.
2. More Pages Indexed – it is only a few pages, but with PageRank it is often not just how much juice you have flowing into a site, but what you do with it.

The reciprocal low quality links might not have had a huge amount of value compared to the benefit of being a member of the "iteration club" and having a few more pages indexed.

Add a link to the designer

Some early single page sales letters were not dangling pages, but didn’t benefit from any internal iterations, and acted as a conduit of juice to their web design firm.

The Danger of Using Nofollow or Robots.txt on Unimportant Pages

I have actually seen this on a few sites:-

• Reciprocal Link Directory Removed
• Link to web designer removed
• Nofollow added to legal papers that are looked on as being unimportant

Such a website is now out of the iteration club, it is a dangling page as it is no longer voting on other pages.

My Own Gotcha

I mentioned that this catches me out as well.

A while ago I wrote an article about linking to Technorati being a problem. It might still be true, but the amount of juice lost through such links might also be lower than I thought, due to Technorati using meta nofollow on every page. Technorati tag pages are themselves dangling pages with no external links.

Wikipedia and Digg on the other hand are not dangling pages. They still have external links to other sites, and thus any links to them are part of iterative calculations.

I would still say it is best to have tags pointing to your own domain tag pages, and to use nofollow on links to Wikipedia and Digg, though with Digg I suggest that is only on links to submission pages which contain no content.

Stumbleupon is also tricky – there are no external links from individual pages, but there is extensive internal linking.

With Digg and Stumbleupon, profiles rank extremely well, so you can use them for reputation management even if you get no juice direct from the profile.

I think I was the first to describe Wikipedia as a black hole of link equity, explained why you should nofollow Wikipedia extensively, and was one of the first to promote Ken’s Nofollow Wikipedia plugin.

You would have thought in 10 months they would have come up with an alternative to using nofollow on all those out-bound links.

They do however link out to a few trusted sites without nofollow, from just a few pages. I suppose Google does still allow them to be part of their iterative calculations.

Another Own Gotcha

This isn’t 100% something I can fix. I have suggested people use robots.txt on certain sites knowing it wasn’t the perfect solution.

You might notice on this site I don’t use an extensive robots.txt, and the design of my site structure is deliberate, but then at the same time I use nofollow with lots of custom theme modifications, and should use it a lot more.

Eventually I will come up with solutions to make things a little easier.

Tools In The Wrong Hands Can Be Dangerous

Using Robots.txt and Meta Noindex, Follow as a cure for duplicate content is a SEO bodge job or SEO bandaid. It may offer some benefits depending on how dangling pages are being handled, but is certainly not an ideal solution due to the amount of leaks that typically remain or dangling pages that are created.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

WebProNews wanted to help our readers and viewers and offer some link building tips for those looking to gain traffic.  We talked with Eric Ward, holistic link developer and publicity strategist, from EricWard.com about what to do when approaching the topic.

Ward recommended planning out your goals and the links you want. Then you can plan out your blueprint accordingly.

We also talked with Brandon Hopkins, Blogger of Brandon-Hopkins.com.  Hopkins gave us several tips to abide by when link building. Some of these tips include:

1. Write an authority article.
2. Interview the experts in your field.
3. Start something crazy, like Blogtipping.
4. Spell check everything, twice.
5. Design an award worthy blog or Website.

Of course there are many things that you shouldn’t do as well. For example, Ward said to never start an email off with I apologize if you are not the correct person to handle this inquiry. Please forward it to the proper person.

But above all, according to Ward, you have to have good content. He said if you spend all of your time trying to become number one on Google, all of it wouldn’t matter if you don’t have great content.

So whether your site is old or new, link building is key to generate traffic.  Just be careful how you acquire the links, most of the search engines frown upon paid linking.  There is no smile or a high five for those who are artificially trying to gain rank. For more tips and details of how to link build, you can watch the video above right here on WebProNews.

>>> Click here to watch the video on Expert SEO Strategies…

When creating your SEO strategy, due diligence mandates that you not just take the word of the first self-styled SEO expert that just ‘shows up’ in your inbox one day. Beyond that it’s an even better idea to look for consensus viewpoints among established and recognized experts in the field.

So, where would an SEO expert start with a site? That’s what we wanted to know. What are some of the common themes, concepts, ideas and practices all of these guys would agree on? We put these questions to four leading SEO guys.

We got some good ones too.

• Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, sure he wears funny shoes, but he’s an SEO rockstar of the first order by anyone’s definition.
• Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, a regular and veteran of the SEO conference scene.
• David Brown of Top SEO Consultants. SEO, forums, podcasts, blogs – if you know a buzzword, David’s probably been there and done it already.
• Brian Mark from Toolbarn.com. Brian is an admin at WebProWorld forum and last year Toolbarn made the list of top 100 Internet retailers. ‘Nuff said.

Obviously, you can watch the video to get the info first hand, but for those of you who prefer to stick with the text here are some of the more interesting points made:

All of these guys agreed on the importance of having a crawlable site. Dump the pull down navigation windows, take it easy on the java script, don’t get nuts with Flash dominated pages. Always use distinct titles and descriptions from page to page. Watch your achor (link) text – you don’t want to use things like ‘click here’ or ‘home’ for your navigation because they don’t mean much to search spiders.

David Brown specifically mentioned the concept of the KEI, or Keyword Efficiency Index when thinking about and choosing keywords you want to focus on. KEI is important and it’s one of those things you can show off to your non-SEO friends to make them understand how smart you are because it has a very impressive looking formula:

KEI = (DS^2/C) = (DS/C * DS)

It’s actually not as complicated as it looks, and there is a great definition of KEI at StrictlyCSS.com.

Eric, Rand and Brian all mentioned how important the content of your site is to your SEO efforts. This is particularly true in terms of garnering those all-important inbound links to your site. As Rand observes specifically, search engines rank based on two factors; relevance and popularity.

Relevance is fairly self-explanatory, but the popularity angle is more interesting. You want your on page content to be popular – not necessarily with engines themselves (because they don’t care) and not necessarily popular with your customers — you want your content to be popular with other people in your field. Similar sites with similar topics, targeting the same kind of areas Links from those kinds of sites/pages are extremely valuable inbound links.

Obviously, this isn’t to say to ignore your customers and end users when you create your content. Simply that you should also be thinking about the attractiveness or linkability of your content to other people sites within your subject area. At the end of the day, nothing will move you further, faster than quality inbound links.

Speaking of inbound links, the general consensus of all of our experts in the video is basically the more the merrier. They all stress the importance and value of having relevant inbound links with good, keyword specific anchor text, but none of them seem to have any qualms or issues with HOW you go about getting them. A couple of guys just flat out admit that they will, and have, paid for sites to link to them.

That said, they also all agree that if you do buy links, you should be smart about it. Be selective about the types of links you buy – make double sure they are relevant etc and just basically keep it under your hat.

There’s plenty more info in the video. Be sure to check it out. If you feel like we left some major point unexplored or have suggestions or ideas for future video interviews, let me know about it and we’ll see what we can come up with.

>>> Watch the Video!

If you’re not a soccer fan, you may not have heard of Goal.com.  But the site’s big, boasting of versions for 16 different languages.  Goal.com also claims to reach over 210 countries, and since some experts say there are just 194 countries on earth, that’s really quite an achievement.

Blinkx is quite large, as well – by its own count, the video search engine has around 14 million hours of content in its index.  Together, I suspect the two companies will do all right, and Mashable’s Adam Ostrow might agree.

“Blinkx appears to be doing a good job of building their distribution network, with many content partnerships already under their belt,” he noted.  “With the company now also offering a way to monetize video through their AdHoc program, Blinkx should be poised for revenue growth as well.”

Indeed, perhaps it’s just out of politeness, but there wasn’t a word about money in the midst of all the usual corporate back-patting.

Standardization would also ensure interoperability between camera, printer, display and software companies.

Developed by Microsoft’s Core Media Processing team, the HD Photo technology is already included in Windows Vista, and the company says the new file format offers better image fidelity, higher image-compression efficiency, and more flexible editing features than traditional JPEG formats.

“We are voting on consideration of this new file format for standardization because we believe it will foster breakthrough, innovative products and services in the photography and printing industries that will have widespread value for consumers around the world,” said Dr. Daniel Lee, convener of the Joint Photographic Expert Group.

Lance Howarth, general manager of the Media Processing Division at ARM Holdings PLC, says the proposed JPEG XR format will improve the capabilities of digital cameras and wireless devices.

"Higher compression efficiency offers faster wireless uploads for longer battery life and an enhanced dynamic range that will help improve photographs taken in low-light conditions with a mobile phone or digital camera that does not offer sufficient flash assistance."

The higher compression is also thought to be important for web-based applications, as higher quality images are enabled by more digital information while decreasing upload and download times.

“In postings on internal mailing groups, users of Wikipedia have described obvious mistakes in the design, a globelike jigsaw puzzle with characters from various languages on the pieces,” reports Noam Cohen for the New York Times.  “Two of the characters – one in Japanese and one in Devanagari, the script used in Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages – are meaningless because of minor slips.”

This is likely going to become yet another embarrassing incident for Wikipedia – it’s been noted in the NYT, after all – though it may not be as bad as the fake expert or the frisky elephants.  Still . . . not good.

In addition to highlighting the existence of errors in Wikipedia, the situation has shown the mettle of (some of) the site’s user base; hold on for a slightly long explanation.

When the basic design was first introduced in 2003, David Friedland “set out to improve the design,” begins Cohen.  “But in the process, Mr. Friedland, who has a degree in computer science and linguistics, introduced the errors. . . .  The Devanagari error was caused by a computer glitch, he said, which swapped the order of two parts of the character; the Japanese error was simply carelessness.”

All right – mistakes happen.  The real problem, however, is that “[t]hough the errors have been discussed among cognoscenti for more than two years, they have not been fixed, mainly because Mr. Friedland says he lost the original computer file and is too busy to start from scratch.”

Right.  I like Wikipedia as much as (or more than) the next person, but again . . . not good.

Deptula serves as Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, and in regards to programs like Google Earth, he said, “To talk about danger is, if I may, really is irrelevant because it’s there.”

As reported by Reuters, Deptula then added, “No one’s going to undo commercial satellite imagery.”

The lieutenant general’s comments could even help quiet some politicians who have called for Google to censor itself.  “Asked if the US military might try to implement restrictions or blackouts on imagery of some areas, Deptula said he was not aware of such an attempt,” according to Kristin Roberts.

As for what the military is doing about this issue . . . there’s not much information.  “[G]overnments are trying to mitigate the effect through camouflage, concealment and deception, he said, providing no other details,” Roberts continued.  Well, I called the military “practical,” not “open.”

In any case, a lot of Googlers are probably hoping that Lt. Gen. Deptula will get the last word on this matter.

Baidu Rivalry

A “preliminary full report” is available through Enquiro, and even the summary, posted by Hotchkiss on Search England Land, is over 2,000 words.  By this, I mean to say that there’s a lot of valuable information, but you’ll need a fair amount of time to process it.  We’ll just be hitting the highlights here.

In short, it appears that, compared to Baidu, Google offers Chinese searchers a more efficient experience.  The heatmaps’ hot spots are more condensed, and Hotchkiss notes, “In our study, an average interaction with Google.cn lasted about 30 seconds, and with Baidu over 55 seconds.”

A blind test between Baidu and Google, conducted by another company, even found that Chinese users might prefer the American offering.

So why is Baidu’s market share three times the size of Google’s?  Well, we’re moving away from those heatmaps, but Hotchkiss’s ideas are entirely plausible (and are backed by evidence).  “There’s a strong preference for a true Chinese search experience,” he writes.  “I noticed in a blog that picked up our very early findings that several Chinese users commented that they use Baidu because it is Chinese.”

Then there’s the matter of entertainment, the one area of the blind test in which Baidu beat Google.  “Baidu is the primary vehicle to locate and download free MP3 files,” states Hotchkiss.  “This generates a huge amount of traffic, as this is one of China’s most popular online activities.  There’s no way of knowing what Baidu’s search share might be if you separate the MP3 traffic out, but my suspicion, backed by a conversation with Piewen at Microsoft, is that it would drop dramatically.”

These findings may not help Google much, but they at least help explain how and why the search giant has been minimized in the Chinese market.

Moglen also serves as chairman for the Software Freedom Law Center, and works as a professor of law at Columbia University – he is, I’d wager, a pretty smart guy.  Robert McMillan reported what Moglen had to say about the Mountain View-based search engine corporation.

“I think we all know that Google has a bias toward secrecy,” Moglen stated.  But pressure from the open source crowd is beginning to build, and he believes it may have an impact on Google’s policies.

“They have ethical and community responsibilities to return at least those modifications that are not critical to their business and that are of general value to the community,” Moglen said.  “We will see over time whether there are additional measures necessary in order to secure cooperation in the community.”

It seems possible that Google won’t give in; after all, the Enterprise Open Source News Desk reports that other major companies have also annoyed the open source community.  In fact, the GPL 3’s “language takes a strong stand against cross-patent agreements such as a deal announced earlier this year by Microsoft and Novell.”

Still, Google might want to listen to Moglen; for better or for worse, some people probably care much more about his requests than about gaining access to books from Switzerland.