I’m going to try an experiment. Google launched a new service called knol this past Wednesday. It’s been billed as the Wikipedia/Squidoo/HubPages alternative, though perhaps more akin to the latter two because of it’s monetization offerings to entry authors, via a Google AdSense revenue-sharing model.
Seeing this made me wonder: could knol be used for search engine optimization purposes?
I know, I know. It’s not the most altruistic thought. But I’ll bet others are thinking the same thing too. So with that in mind, I whipped up an entry on “Michael Lee“. To be fair and still offer hopefully useful community content (though, erm, I guess that’s debatable), I linked to a bunch of other Michael/Mike Lee’s as well.
That’s not too smart, SEO-wise, since I just gave link love to my “competitors” (and by competitors, I mean others who rank high for the name Mike Lee on a search engine). But then I also filled out my knol profile, which seemed to create another entry for “Mike Lee“. Both entries seem to have equal weight in a knol search, even though I thought one was just a profile page. Hmmm.
So will this give me any link love?
My guess is: probably not. I really doubt anyone’s going to be searching knol for the name “Mike Lee”. And since Google isn’t surfacing any of this content onto their search results (yet), I doubt many people are going to see it.
But will it help my search engine ranking to have a link from the google.com domain? Perhaps? I’m not sure. I’ll revisit this little experiment to see if it’s had any impact in a week or so. Stay tuned!
Interesting experiment. I don’t think knol is going to go anywhere unless Google artificially inflates its rankings. Which they might. Do no evil my ass!