No, I have not been drinking anything nor have I been smoking any kind of strange sweet tobacco. I am actually a bit reticent to share this information for the Google Gods may realize their error and make adjustments to their site and correct this oversight. But if I don’t mention it someone else will. So here it goes.
Today, I am going to talk about Google Knol. Knol stands for a unit of measure for knowledge. This site was developed to allow very educated individuals to write about areas of their expertise. You simply register and begin to post. In many ways it is like the website Scribd.com. It seems to be a little bit of wiki and Blogger rolled into one. Late last month (October 2008) Google quietly opened its Knol service to the general public. There hasn’t been a lot written about the subject lately. However, I was visiting another obscure blog when I saw a post about Knol. So I took the time to visit and to sign up and to start posting. That’s when I noticed something unusual. The article that I had read noted that Google seemed to be giving a lot of authority to articles posted on Knol. It went on to state that Knol could be used effectively to acquire a first page listing in the Google SERP’s for niche keyword searches. Since Niche SEO markets are our bread and butter we figured that we should take a look around. I surf the web often and most of the time I do so using with SEOQuake enabled. It will indicate if a link is no follow or do follow. We noticed that links to the posters profile were no follow, but the permalink was a do follow link.
This seemed odd to me so I dug a little deeper into Knol and started reading some of the posts. Much to my amazement and shock I discovered that links embedded in these Knol’s were actually “Do Follow” links. Google has forced no follow links on blogs and most major sites that are social media in nature. It has made life very difficult for many websites to gain links that pass link juice that affects their algorithm and thus the search results. So the fact that they are not applying these principals to their own website seems a bit hypocritical to me. I am certain that many others will agree with me. Now here is where this discovery begins to go south. I have 2 choices to make here. I could simply re-write my hundred or so posts and place them in Knol and snag a bunch of do follow links from Google and wait until someone else brings this to everyone’s attention. Then watch this benefit dissolve or I can bring it to your attention and see how long it takes for Google to re-act. Well, if you are reading this then I decided to share what I discovered. Now, nine months later Google's Knol is still Do Follow and there has hardly been a whimper from the SEO community... Now, that is indeed odd!
Thanks,
Boris
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