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Google's unit of knowledge measures up in SERPs

Well-respected search pundit Danny Sullivan put the newly-launched Google Knol to the test, to see if contributed pages found their way into a top-ten placement in Google's search results.

If Knol were a baseball player, it would be in contention for the Major League batting title going into the second half of the season.

Sullivan noted his findings on Search Engine Land, after taking a look at 30 different knols selected from the main Knol page. Of those thirty, ten made the top-ten search results for their keyword searches on Google.

"We've been assured that just because content sits on Google's Knol site, it won't gain any ranking authority from being part of the Knol domain," Sullivan wrote.

Being a new site, Knol didn't show any PageRank. But behind the scenes, as Sullivan suggested, PageRank calculations happen continually.

We decided to repeat his experiment; it's easy enough to do, making it well-suited for our purposes. Here's where we found Knol pages in the top-ten for their keywords, when they ranked that well:

A Crisis in Leadership: 4
Restless Leg Syndrome: 0
Ischemic Stroke: 0
Breastfeeding: 0
Chicago Hot Dogs: 0
Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM): 0
Lung Cancer: 6
Buttermilk Pancakes: 0
Music in Capoeira: 3
Pediatric Sports Injuries: 0

We batted 3 out of 10 in randomly picking topics off of the Knol home page, an average that would keep us in the batting order every day and have our agent salivating over free agent negotiations at baseball's winter meetings.

Google's Knol will get a lot of SEO attention, there's no doubt about it. The opportunity to grab prime organic placement for a given keyword phrase, at minimal cost, will be irresistible.