.. or as Tiffany Monhollon so deftly put it in the words of the bard, To Knol or Not to Knol? Her post is well worth reading since it summarizes much of the present decision problem many of us are facing:
That is the question of the day, isn’t it? With so much talk about whether or not this new service is the Wikipedia-killer or a threat to Squidoo, thought-leaders (and potential experts) everywhere have to be turning that question over in their minds.
The problem is, Knol is such a new tool, even though Google’s done an admirable job trying to define how the process works and what a good product looks like, no one really knows what to do with it yet, much less what to think of it. That’s because what will really define Knol is user involvement. And you better believe Google knows that.
In a world where content is king, Google’s new service simply can’t survive much less become a threat to anything without thoughtful participation from a crowd of established experts. The reason for this is simple: That’s the added value Knol supposedly brings to users – expertise.
If you are surprised by that just check out some of the topics in the Plain old bag o’ knols section of the Knol home page.
Since these topics are on the Knol homepage, which is now receiving an incredible number of links from everyone trying to understand the Knol, it is quite clear that these Knol pages will naturally dominate the keyword query search pages. Although some question whether Google will wish to continue with Knols, they will probably find it too attractive in revenue terms to kill off.
For others of us dealing with topics which are less ad-rich, Knol presents a real dilemma. Will Knol become the place to be seen? That will be true only if regular Knol pages turn out to have natural high rankings in keyword query searches. Although a Knol page gives only minor returns to its author, if you are number one in a marketplace, can you afford to let your competitor be the one who writes the important Knol page in your field.
On present indications, you probably can let the competitor do the work. It seems quite clear that Google cannot give an unnatural advantage to its Knol pages in its search algorithms. If it did, the distinction between its natural listings and its paid advertising would become very fuzzy. That would be something that many would certainly encourage the FTC to check out with vigor.
.. and of course if the competitor does write a knol that seems to be gaining traction, your choice is clear. Just go out and write a better Knol on the same subject. If yours gets better reviews then presumably like cream it will float to the top.
That will be a good option for people who use wiki as a link juice opportunity because Wiki already is full f information. Regarding Knol, it has pretty fair opportunities to have some top level knols. I think it will be beginning of a new war between link grabbers which will benefit rest of the world in an information way.
.. except of course that there’s no link juice to be had there. All links are nofollow-ed. This is just real estate for more Adwords ads.
I was just working on my site to optimize it for Google and I came to know about a fact. yahoo has nothing to do with “no follow” or “do follow”, They count all links equally so it is importance of the site where link is located. On the other hand, I think Wiki also don’t allow “do/no follow” shit so we can only get some good traffic or link there can be counted on behalf of Yahoo or MSN. Let me know If I shall be wrong.
I agree, Barry, that this seems like Google’s attempt to lump together masses of low quality content on disparate topics, try to have them rank in search queries for low competition or long tail keywords and then monetise that traffic with PPC ads.
Hang on….that sounds like a MFA farm. Nah, Google couldn’t be doing that 🙂
See this is how google is trying to monopolize the market once again. Truthfully, I am kind of getting sick of seeing wiki in every google search I do.
Many super duper products on this plant still have ambiguities. I am not sure but May be Knol is one of that. I am not in the favor not against such applications but Google Knol is not as popular as its other applications. May be they need more content and more authenticated info. It is not easy task to get published on WIKI, I think that's why wiki is so informative and useful.
No It is not monopolization, I think this is called growing information networks. I think Google is helping to set some standards. This is not monopoly but it is going towards a perfect competition.
This does present an interesting dilemma. If folks start linking into this content in the same manner that they currently do with Wikipedia, Google is going to dominate its own search results. A few years ago it seemed as though there were no anti-Google pundits. Google was the darling of the search world. To a former SEO, this was at least somewhat annoying because a few legitimate search engine options would have been nice. Now, it seems, there are plenty of people willing to bash Google when they do something wrong, so it will be interesting to see how this develops.
It will be interesting to see how they begin to regulate this stuff on Google. I am a huge fan of wiki and love the user experience it offers. It’s a pretty good resource and is getting better everyday.
I am one of those who is having a hard time wrapping my head around the importance of this service. Sort of like Wikipedia, sort of like About.com, sort of like ezinearticles.com. I wonder if it will become just another influence that ends up diluting search results with stuff that people can’t really use. I’m getting sick of Adwords-driven sites that have low-quality content stolen from other places.
I am also agreeing with .Net Programmer. This should definitely be an interesting service. I have yet to check it out, but I will do so now. Great post. Thanks for the info.