Just a quick note - yesterday Google (somewhat) quietly announced that Google Knol is now accepting contributions from anyone with a Google login.  Basically it’s a Google Wikipedia that allows contributors to earn a portion of the profits from ads displayed on each page.  They claim that it is more focused on how-to and informational articles than Wikipedia, which is more about information on generic words, phrases, movies, video games, gadgets, etc. but I’m sure that Knol will cover those things too.

 It’s a smart idea from Google’s perspective.  Wikipedia has a whopping 400 million pages indexed in Yahoo (~12M in Google) right now.  That’s all from free contributors – so you can imagine how much content Knol is going to fill up with. 

The Wikipedia Factor

Not to mention the fact that Google can make sure that Knol gets enough traffic to greatly benefit contributors.  In fact I could see the Knol topic appearing as one of those special inserts right at the top, much the way you might see a Google Map result when searching for local businesses. 

It’s always annoyed me how Google has, in my opinion, unfairly ranked Wikipedia so highly.  When doing keyword research, seeing Wikipedia in the top two rankings can be a kiss of death – it’s nearly *impossible* to push that page out no matter how authoritative your site becomes.

That’s the reason for my (somewhat overstated :-) title for this post.  If you thought Wikipedia has a lot of unusually high search rankings, I can only imagine how much 'Google juice' Knol will be collecting.  To be quite honest, from the quality of content that is on Knol now, much of it probably does deserve to rank very highly for the topics covered. 

On the Bright Side, I Could Be Wrong!

From the short amount of testing I've done, I haven't seen articles from Knol rank unusually high yet, which is a good sign.  I also wonder if the existence of ads will cause bloggers and webmasters to hesitate to link freely to it.  The fact that Wikipedia has always been ad-free, I believe, is one of the main reasons it's gained so much authority in the search engines.

But What To Do About It?

So Knol is almost certainly going to be huge.  Google definitely has the power to make it huge if it so chooses.  It’s going to cover every topic under the sun, and most importantly those articles are almost certainly going to appear high in the search engines (one way or another).  So here’s a tip:

For webmasters: Whatever niches you are in, start claiming your space by creating Google Knol articles on those topics before someone else beats you to it.  If you can sneak in a reference to your site in the process, that would be even better!

For anyone: Take a look at Google Knol, maybe even do some keyword research to find what kinds of how-to topics people are searching for and write a few good articles.  Odds are you will start seeing some passive revenue for your efforts!