Google, Knol and SEO

So, after Google's 'Knol' was announced at the end of last year, it finally launched in beta on the 23rd July.  For those of you who haven't heard about it, it's basically Google's version of Wikipedia; with differences including that all contributors to the Knol project must sign in first with a Google account and are supposed to state their real names.  If permission is given, Google will check the veracity of the name information by credit card or phone. Google believes that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.  Another point of differnce is that whilst Wikipedia articles are written collectively under a "neutral point of view" policy, Knol will highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship and will contain the personal opinions of the author.

More information and more opinion on more topics must surely be a good thing...however, there has been debate on whether Google search results can remain neutral because of possible conflict of interest - what's to stop Google from ranking Knol results high up on the SEO listings and remain unbiased?  Now that it has launched, these concerns seem to have become reality, and this mashable article highlights the issues quite well...it remains to be seen how the SEO landscape on Google will change once Knol is out of beta and at full capacity.

Source: Wikipedia, mashable

Comments

[Pittsburgh SEO]

Good post. I've been going a lot of thinking about this whole issue with Google remaining neutral on the SEO side of their Knol site and realized that it would be in their better interest to not have their knol articles knock out to many other sites in the SERPs. I mean think about it if it did then all you'd get when you search Google is a bunch of knol articles and I'm sure general users would get a little feed up with that. So it would bring down the quality of Google as a search engine. I'm sure they thought about this before releasing the Knol site so I don't think we have to worry to much about it. Of course there probably will still be some knol articles that get good placment but I don't think it will be over run with them.

Also I wrote an article going over some SEO tids on Knols you should check it out and post a comment http://seo.pittwebsite.com/blog/tid-bits-of-seo-knowledge-on-knols