Google’s new knol project features articles on any topic by anybody who cares to call themselves an expert. The concept is really intriguing as it relates to bringing higher authority information online that will be vetted both by the author and by the community at large.
Search marketing guru Aaron Wall is one of the sharpest fellows in the SEO business and he’s been testing knol and has concerns about the results both in terms of outranking original material and copyright.
The SMX search folks – I think it was Danny Sullivan – have also been testing knol and also are suggesting knol material is ranking very well. Google says they are not giving their own site preferential treatment, but I’m guessing what they mean is that they are applying the same rules to knol as other sites. If, for example, those rules that are *applied equally to all sites* happen to include a high value for incoming links from Google sites or other knol pages, the knol content effectively has a big advantage, technically without any special treatment.
In terms of search strategy I think the rule here is to …. write some knol page for topics of interest to you or topics for which you want to improve your rank. I expect knol to be a huge topic at the upcoming search conference – SES San Jose.
Later: Time to check out this knol thing by creating some content myself. Here are listings I created for:
Beijing, China | Blogs and Blogging
