Google has launched Google Knol officially today (officially beta of course) and in case you don’t know what Google Knol is about:

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

Essentially it’s middle ground between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia - with ads for revenue! It’s heavily focused on authors writing the content (the URL strings are author-based first, article title second).

So, how useful could it be for abuse… I mean for SEO? It’s definitely useful, but think twice about the amount of time you will need to spend on it.

The Good

• It is expected that many of these pages will rank quite well for a variety of terms with external backlinks and that Google will be promoting it through very highly ranked Google pages.
• $$$$ - need I say more?
• Brand reputation management for people and corporations
• Long-tail content that can be outsourced

The Bad

• Brand reputation hits on people and corporations
• <meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow” /> - So much for getting backlinks to your site with spammy pages (this goes for internal links as well)
• The amount of time to spend writing worthwhile articles may not be worth the investment except in certain markets
• Once you die, Google no longer needs to pay anyone–in the long term that means heavy investment up front, but low maintenance costs over time

And The Ugly

• Wanna knock down prominent Wikipedia pages? Duplicate the content, but change it enough to avoid claims of copying it
• Google corporate-owned SERPs
• Once the site gets large enough, the feasibility of stopping spam may become too great to stop (This is different from Wikipedia due to vigilant non-Wikipedia employee people helping for free)

There’s probably more on each side, but these are the first few ideas that popped into my head. Feel free to comment on any other things that may come up.

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As I’ve noted a couple times about Google China copying Baidu in trying to surpass Baidu to become market leader within five years with dubious efforts in really understanding the Chinese market, Redline China (Pearl Research) conducted a study seeing how aware the Chinese people are about Google:

Based on interviews with the Chinese youth demographic, Google continues to struggle with lower user awareness, compared to Chinese search engine Baidu. These findings are contained in consulting firm Pearl Research’s new report “Baidu vs. Google: A Study of Search Engine Preferences among Chinese Youth.” A sample of the report can be found here: http://www.redlinechina.com/main/images2/SAMPLE_PearlResearch_Baidu_versus_Google_analysis_0801.pdf

It looks like Google continues to struggle in the wrong areas–yes, it is working hard to be better than Baidu (and in many areas it already is), but what Google still seems to not understand is the belief that a foreign company cannot do as well as a domestic one.

Key findings of the report: - Google is thought of as a foreign service which is not as suitable for Chinese searches Our interviews indicate that many Chinese youth chose to use Baidu over Google because they believe Baidu is a domestic product and thus should be better at indexing Chinese content.

When you see results like this, that means its time to start advertising within China to fight the perception through all marketing channels, even in channels that Google has previously forsaken (eg: TV advertising). Look, no matter how much better Betamax was over VHS, VHS understood the market was there in taping the full length of football games rather than having to put in two Betamax’s.

Sometimes superior products or services lose out to a competitor that can capitalize on what consumers actually want. Until Google understand this, it will always be second to Baidu.

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The more and more I see Google gobble up new areas and jump into new verticals, the more I personally envision their own search results filled with just about only their own products. For someone who works on improving client search results for SEO, this will become an ever-increasing frustration as Google’s SERPs will be less and less beneficial for clients looking for direct impacts to their site. How so? Here’s a vision of how the search results could be in a few years (click to enlarge):

Of course, that entirely depends on whether Google is still around. Nonetheless, as frustrating as it can be to see these results, it makes me wonder how much Google is just shooting itself in the foot the more it continues to promote its own products over other results (manually or algorithimically). All one would need is a great advertising campaign to publically make fun of Google for having all its search results as Google.

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Why use allow people to use Wikipedia and lose precious revenue when you can just go to Baidu’s own search engine friendly “Baidupedia” (百度百科)? Cnet has more:

“There’s, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia, a service based ‘out there,’” Chang said at the WWW2008 conference in Beijing on Tuesday. “It’s very natural for China to make its own products.”

Quite so! But something is entirely lost to Graham Webster when he states:

I agree that there’s not always a reason for people to use global services, especially when what they deal with is primarily domestic. But with the wiki world, I think the value of cross-border, multilingual conversation is astonishingly high.

Especially as autotranslation gets better, the benefit of not having populations nationally siloed comes into focus. If we can both read and contribute knowledge to something that primarily exists in a language I don’t know, then we really can share knowledge.

Until that utopian vision comes true, though, it very well may be that Wikipedia isn’t yet built ideally for Chinese users. Perhaps Baidu is doing a better job for people in this country. But I hope we can all get to conversing across this divide.

Follow the money–why else for Google to create its own version that is not going to be global right away anyway when Wikipedia will suffice?

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In addition to my previous post on Google looking to become the market leader in China, Google is also looking to surpass Baidu as well. Sinovantage International’s blog states:

According to multiple reports, Google has set up a five years plan to gain supremacy in the search engine industry. To do so, it will need to win market share against the old rival, Baidu.com. In the short term, Google will invest in social networking sites and companies in China, while expanding on its mobile deals.

I think Google has two main issues that needs to be addressed quite urgently:

1-Google.cn is NOT better than Baidu.

2-Baidu offers services that are better than Google’s ones, or that Google just cannot offer (I am talking MP3 search for instance).

I cannot say on whether Google.cn is better than Baidu (I have heard both ways from my Chinese friends), but in terms of offering additional services, they are spot on.

And I have to repeat, Google continues to make mistakes within China that really is not helping them when the deck of cards are already stacked against them as it is.

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Google is becoming more determined about making the more creative SEO ideas as blackhat and against Google’s guidelines. SEO book notes:

There is a great thread over on SEOmoz by Matthew Inman about how some Googlers consider any of his future attempted linkbaits and widgetbaits to be off topic spam, based on his aggressive misuse of widgets in the past.

With hundreds of comments many of them are noise, but some of them are spot on with Google’s current trends, especially those from Jeremy Luebke and Jim Boykin. Jeremy wrote:

Google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat. It won’t be long before all off topic linkbait, including articles, is considered linkspam.

I would have to say that it is a bit ironic to claim that anything with the term “bait” as in “using bait to catch the dumb fish to eat” (that would be the SEO-ignorant people) is really white hat. The concept of anything called ‘linkbait’ or ‘widgetbait’ automatically implies your working towards the search engines in mind.

At least, that’s how I think Google perceives it.

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Google has some aspirations to be a market leader in China within the next five years:

His plans to achieving that goal is not exactly clear; he did say Google will focus more on social and mobile features in China. Lee is still seeking social networking and mobile partnerships and acquisitions to help gain share. Lee told us this back in October, saying a redesigned Google China is necessary, and mobile is the way Google must go.

Google lost its best chance over two years ago when it moved its operations into Shanghai while still having a site predominantly in English. Now, with the Chinese government behind the scenes pushing for Baidu, which still has a far larger share, I do not see this as being a very likely situation as Baidu knows its market far better along with the ability to ignore international pressure on copyright issues.

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With the full text of Google’s general guidelines leaked on remote quality raters (April 2007 version — PDF) , one can really envision the immense problems that Google is having with its algorithm. A company that proclaimed itself as being able to algorithmically determine what should rank well across the web has been slowly backtracking towards either a manual approach or a double-checking approach towards Google’s search results.

News of the document is spreading like wildfire with ideas on how to use it to every SEO advantage. You can even begin to see further manual reviews happening as well affecting a multitude of websites.

Nonetheless, what the main players are not noting is how blatantly this points out the failure of Google’s algorithm and the future of spam results showing up more prominently.

(more…)

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As a major fan of the expected release of Spore, it was interesting to see Google actually promote Spore by noting that games can now utilize Youtube by uploading a quick video:

Enter Spore, the much anticipated game from Electronic Arts and Maxis, which lets players create their own alien creatures, import their creations into the game world, and upload video of their creatures’ moves directly to YouTube from within the game. Additionally, all of the YouTube community can enjoy: Spore’s own YouTube Channel, which will showcase the most popular videos of creatures fans and gamers create.

I am certain this will help increase the visibility and popularity of the game, but I am surprised they didn’t expand on this and noting how this could be used for popular games like World of Warcraft where players commonly put up their own videos.

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I may like to knock on Google every so often and even promote Google Search Sucks, but if there’s one thing that Google truly understands at this point in time, it’s the concern over privacy.

The Official Google Blog has a post up about how Google is always concerned about their privacy, and for the most part in this area, Google definitely does a good job when comparing it to social platforms, advertising, credit card companies, health companies, and so forth.

In my opinion, Google essentially has to be when it toes the line between getting data for better ads and having data for other illicit uses.

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