Write Great Google Knols

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.

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.

How crazy will people be about getting their hands on an invitation to become a Google Knol early adopter? As far as I can figure, that depends on two factors:

• Supply and demand: How quickly will Google open up the gates to let just anybody in? This is Google, after all, and not some startup with worries about bandwidth and storage costs. If I recall correctly, highly-restricted beta periods for previous products like Gmail or Docs and Spreadsheets have been brief.
• The value of knol-related SEO: This is hard to predict–I’m only an SEO acolyte. Presumably if you can create highly-ranked knols in your subject area, and then link back to your own content, that’s attracted. Simultaneously, you can make AdSense revenue from highly-ranked knols. Here’s the kicker though: how much will expertise matter? On the rest of the web, there’s definitely an ongoing battle between the most ‘popular’ page and the most ‘authoritative’ or ‘informative’ page. They are often not the same thing. Will knols be any different? I doubt it, but we’ll see.

Will we see knol invites up on eBay? We might, for a very short period of time. If Google sticks to its usual beta process, the number of knol users should grow sharply, quickly.