Confabulations

Google Knol has now been available to the public since July 2008, and was intended to be a knowledge forum. Expert authors are encouraged to share their knowledge with the rest of the world, and Google wanted these ‘knols’ to be the first port of call for any Internet user needing a quick answer or wanting to learn more on a particular topic.

Whilst this is what Knol basically does, its success is somewhat less than Google had hoped for. Most people you ask will name Wikipedia as the best online encyclopaedia, and a large number have never even heard of Knol. And whilst many SEO experts have criticised Knol for been to similar to Wiki, it has been no way as effective. The first page 1 ranking Knol I came across through an organic search was just three days ago, and I am a fairly considerable Internet user. When you consider that Wikipedia results are on the first page of search results for nearly every search you do, you can see just how ineffective it has been in its first year.

However, this has not stopped theories that Google gives extra weight to Knol pages because of their affiliation with the Google core domain. Aaron Walls and the Search Engine Land blog both tested knol after it launched and found that a third of articles that had been featured on Knol’s homepage were appearing on page one of Google search results within twenty four hours of it launching. To say that the homepage had no official page rank, and the site was only a day old, these results point towards the fact that Google’s algorithm supports affiliated content.

Google is fighting against spam with Knol. Every outgoing link is a nofollow, so it will not affect search engine rankings for the sites they point to. Also, Cedric Dupont has officially said that Knol will be banned from Google if spam gets out of control. But it is still a good directory to put articles onto to increase traffic for your clients, especially if you manage to get your pages on the homepage.

Knol is making online content submission easier for speakers of languages other than English. It is already available in eight different languages; Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. using the “Google in Your Language’, users can add articles in other languages as well. As of January 2009, there were articles in 59 languages posted on Knol. On average, people from 197 countries visit knol on a daily basis.

These figures should be making Knol a successful knowledge database but figures from 2009 show that after reaching a traffic peak in February, traffic has been continuously falling since. Whilst this is not unusual for relatively new websites, and Wikipedia did take two years to become really successful, with the power of Google behind it, Knol should be performing better than this. The main problem is that most Internet users just don’t know about it. For quick pieces of information on niche subjects, Wikipedia is still the number one forum by a long way. Ask any student what they use when they need quick answers and nine times out of ten, Wiki will be there reply.

For Knol to become as big as its rivals, more people need to know about it. The content in individual knol pages is good, and the authors are experts for the most part. But the fact that spamming is present and the search results tend to be too generalised makes the user experience slow and difficult. Improving this will go a long way to improving Knol and its reviews.