Write Great Google Knols

I received an email this morning saying that Knol had a lengthy outage last night. I don’t see anything mentioned on Knol Bugs and Work-arounds. Did anybody else notice the site going down last night?

Over at Mashable, Mark has written an article pointing out that, only three days after Knol’s release, nefarious SEO types are experimenting with ways to spam Knol:

The time for speculation as to when this will occur, though, is past. A while back I somehow got subscribed to a list belonging to a maker of splog automation software by the name of Peter Drew. He’s since moved to the semi-legitimate world of automated article creation software, but relies on very suspect methods of revenue, affiliate marketing and SEO generation to promote his software.

This morning I received the URGENT ALERT that a mere three days after the launch of Google’s Knol, he’s already created an automated Knol article generator.

I’m not sure that ‘automated article creation’ qualifies even as ’semi-legitimate’. Nonetheless, Mr. Drew has developed a piece of software colourfully named the Badass Google Knol Dominator. Here’s an introductory video:

It’s basically an automatic article submitter. Which, on the surface, doesn’t seem that problematic. However, as Mark from Mashable points out:

As you can tell, the purpose of this software isn’t to create valuable “Knol units” or to spread the altruistic dream of free knowledge for all, but to create Knols with the purpose to squat on as much namespace as possible while attempting to reap the rewards of high value links from the Google domain these articles will sit on.

Obviously spam is going to be a huge problem for Google Knol to deal with. I note, for example, that the first Knol on Digg that I found is copied verbatim from the Wikipedia article on the same topic.

I don’t know much about anti-spam tactics, but I assume there are some pretty simple strategies to block tools like Mr. Drew’s. Captchas would probably be effective, as would some kind of restriction on the number of submissions per hour.

People are going to try to game Knol just as they try to game every other money or link generating site on the web. It’s just the latest chapter in an arms race between companies and the parasitical strategies people employ to exploit them. Google has lots of experience to bring to bear on the problem, so I expect they’ll do a decent (though imperfect) job of separating the wheat from the chafe.

Fellow British Columbian Rob Cottingham draws an entertaining comic about tech issues called Noise to Signal. Today’s features Google Knol:

One of the big questions about Google Knol is about its impact on SEO. Specifically, how will knols rank in search engine results? Google has a long (though imperfect tradition) of ‘not being evil’. But, as many have pointed out, the Knol project puts them in both the content creation and delivery businesses. The temptation to abuse that scenario and reap the benefits of more ad revenue must be extraordinarily high.

Mind you, there’s a watchful and robust search community that will be watching Google like a bunch of nerdy hawks.

That community has been running some early experiments on Knol and it’s SEO potential. Danny Sullivan randomly selected thirty knols that had been listed on the Google Knol front page, and assessed how they’d done in search rankings:

OK, so 10 of the 30 — 33% of what I looked at — hit the top ten or first page of results. You can spin that both ways. It’s proof that being in Knol is NOT an automatic ride to the top of the search results. But then again, knowing that 33% of your stuff will rank within a day is a pretty good track record.

Of course, that’s a pretty small sample size. And, who knows, maybe Google is intentionally featuring content on its home page that’s over-served by the rest of the web. That might be a subtle–and possibly justifiable–way of leveraging their own search data. It’s also worth noting that there will be lots of incoming links to these prominent articles in the immediate days after launch. I’m no SEO expert, but I understand that ‘freshness’ is a factor in search result pages.

Philipp has written a piece questioning Google’s no-follow policy for individual knols:

All of this taken into account brings up the question: if Knols are treated like any other page by Google, why would there be a need for a blanket “nofollow” approach to the content, then? Google can’t be possibly suggesting a general nofollow is the appropriate way to publish content on all web pages out there (which are also all “user generated” content in some way), or can they?

David also ran an experiment, creating a knol and then checking out how it performed a day later:

The Google Knol I created yesterday entitled ‘How to Read the Russian Alphabet in 75 Minutes‘ is on Page 1 of a Google Search for “read russian” with 12,300,000 results following. I have updated the title from the one showing in the Google index, but that’s still pretty impressive.

Of course, one assumes that Google will be keeping a close eye on link-filled pages whose primary goal seems to be driving traffic somewhere else.

I’ve been compiling an ad hoc list of some of the communities that have immediately sprung up around Google Knol. Obviously the site itself has a ton of community (consider all the action on, say, this knol on writing knols), but there are other corners of the web for knol enthusiasts:

• There’s a group on Orkut (people still use Orkut?) with 314 members.
• A Facebook group with 380 members, but no activity since January.
• Knol Roll, the first of two Knol networks on Ning.
• The creatively named Knol Stuff looks to be the big winner, with 4344 members. I’m somewhat baffled by the forum, though, as most of the topics (boating education? Dance Nation?) don’t actually seem related to Google Knol (

Maybe the knol community will just live and succeed on Google’s servers?

You know, it’s shocking how many Web 2.0, user-content-generation sites launch without providing any kind of metrics to their users. It took, like, four years for Flickr to add detailed stats about who was looking at my photos, and YouTube was similarly slow on the stats front.

Google’s got plenty of examples to learn from. And yet they seem to have launched without any user-facing statistics. There are comments and reviews, but there’s no way to judge how many visitors your knol is receiving.

If you enable AdSense revenue sharing on your knols, you may be able to get a view into your knols’ popularity. AdSense normally reports how many impressions an ad has received, so maybe this functionality will extend to ads on knols.

That said, Google obviously has some readily-available technology to provide plenty of analytics to its users. I assume they haven’t rolled out these features because, in the early days, they don’t want to advertise low performing pages?

I thought I’d do a quick round-up of reactions to Knol from some prominent corners of the web. I’ll skip the basic facts, and focus on the analysis:

• Danny Sullivan on the lack of any browse-centric navigation: “At first I thought this odd, but then it made a lot of sense. I certainly never go to the Wikipedia home page to browse my way to a Wikipedia entry. Usually, I get to an entry by searching for the topic (and typically from having done that search on Google itself).”
• Jason Kincaid worries that the financial incentive of AdSense means that users will ignore less popular subjects: “We’re going to start seeing a flurry of articles on the most popular content - expect to see dozens of biographies on Barack Obama and John McCain in the next few days. For these popular subjects the system should work well - a few lucky (and hopefully credible) articles will rise to the top, and the rest will fade away.”
• Jordan McCollum is concerned about the many-knols-on-one-topic quandary: “But, to ask search engines’ perennial spam-defining question, is it good for users? You find six—or sixteen or sixty—pages on druidic religions—which do you read? Who do you believe when they disagree? And how do you find them and know that there are other knols on the same topic?”
• Arnold Zafra sounds underwhelmed: “Wikipedia doesn’t have to worry about Knol. Despite the Google branding its not and will never be a Wikipedia killer. Knol is more of a “socialized”, free-for-all, anyone-can-be-an-author version of About.com.”
• Like many, MG Siegler is concerned about Google playing fair with knols in search results: “What if Google highlights knols in someway different from other results? Look at what it does for YouTube videos and other Google content with its universal search.”
• Over at Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Lenssen compares the Wikipedia vs. Knol authorship model: “there’s a lot to be won by allowing everyone to quickly do edits, but a more tightly controlled model may have benefits as well. And perhaps all those people complaining about Wikipedia – or who had Wikipedia articles they started be deleted, as Wikipedia does not allow all kinds of entries – will now consider Knol a potential new home for research and sharing.”
• A Slashdot commenter notes that there’s some appeal to Wikipedia’s anonymity: “Part of contributing to Wikipedia is that you’re anonymous… would you really want someone to know that despite being a huge football fan, you also knew about My Little Pony?”
• Wired has an in-depth piece which merits a thorough reading. I did like this quote from Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica: “it’s not the presence of Wikipedia that’s a problem, it’s the omnipresence of Wikipedia.”

I was compiling and sifting through reaction to the Knol launch from around the web, and noticed something weird. I searched Digg.com for front page stories about ‘knol’. No joy–the newest is 189 days old. It’s the same deal for stories involving Google–nothing on the Knol launch there.

It struck me as odd, that the tech news giant was, for all intents and purposes, ignoring the launch of Google Knol. There were a couple of submissions at around 60 to 65 Diggs, but not enough to hit the notorious front page.

Then I figured it out. I feel a little silly, actually, because I noticed this news earlier in the day:

3900 Diggs and counting. That’s big news in that community. There’s even a supplementary story that’s received over 2500 Diggs.

Of course, it’s not like there’s a click-scarcity on Digg. Diggers could push both Google-related stories to the front page, but for whatever reason, the, uh, sourced-crowd chose not too favour Knol. Maybe tomorrow?

UPDATE: Today, Digg finally pushed a knol story to the front page. Oddly, it’s from PhysOrg.com.

The big day is finally here, and Google has taken the wrappers off Google Knol. From the official announcement:

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

I’ll be writing a series of posts over the next few days checking out reactions to the launch and the project itself. My wife and I did put together a quick knol on social media marketing, as a first experiment with the platform.