Write Great Google Knols

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.