Wednesday, July 30, 2008

New To Knolling?

Well so am I! I guess I am a little behind the wagon train because I just signed up on this recent addition to Google’s bag of tricks. A “knol” as defined by Google is a “unit of knowledge.” Of course, I am a bit unclear about what a “unit” of knowledge really means and if it is supposed to be a metric or US unit, but nonetheless, it is some type of unit. Upon visiting knol.google.com, I signed up for my own profile, for which I was then required to verify over the telephone. It felt like I was sucked into that early 90’s movie Sneakers - “my voice is my passport, verify me,” though I am not comparing myself to Robert Redford in any way. Once I was in and all verified up, I was then allowed to write my very first Knol, and how exhilarating it was to create my very own “unit of knowledge.”

As the initial excitement began to wear off, I found myself quite familiar with this Wikipedia style content submission, the main difference being less focus on terminology and definitions and more on full articles with unique titles. Just like Wikipedia however, other users can comment on and amend the submissions of other users. The idea being that information will continue to be revised and updated to provide the best information to readers.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that anchortext links are quite welcome and encouraged by the edit html tool found on the editing page for any knol. So of course I tossed in a link back to me and a few others to various sites I think worthy, so I guess we’ll see what that does. I was also able to add “bio” to my profile, which also included some anchortext, but the interesting thing is that this bio is also considered a knol. I suppose my life story (not really) is at least a unit or two of knowledge. You never know what you might be asked on in the final round of Jeopardy.

Since the creation over eight months ago, Google’s knol has gained a bit of press in search engine circles. Various SEO’s have run experiments to see how the mother ship search engine treats this little toddler finding some pretty interesting results. It seems as though Google tends to give it some preferential treatment when it comes to ranking content from the Knol versus identical content posted previously on other websites. David Utter talked about this yesterday on a Web Pro News Blog. Personally I don’t see too much of a problem with it. They have been giving the same preferential treatment to their other services like adwords, analytics, blogging, and email for years, as do all of the other search engines.

By and large, I think this is a very interesting new space to explore, and I certainly plan on contributing quite regularly. I think Google is on the right track by introducing some more user generated spaces. The social media trend continues to grow, and they should continue to think of new ways to join the game in order to stay on top.

About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in Internet marketing is largely focused on the social media optimization and multi-media facets of exposure. To learn more about reputation management and this search engine optimization firm, visit www.arteworks.biz.



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