The Dangers of Google Knol

Taking a look back, shortly after YouTube was purchased by Google, their results seemed to instantly flood the search engine results page. Makes it kind of suspicious as it looks like Google is giving more weight to their in house material.

With that in the past, one of the most recent additions to the Google line-up, Knol, seems to be doing the same thing. SearchEngineLand recently examined the fact that this is actually happening. They took the information directly off of one of their main sites, that was also syndicated to Business.com, and added it to their own Google Knol. What happened next was very surprising. The Google Knol that they had created actually outranked the Business.com page. This is despite the fact that the page and site itself had a much higher page rank than the Google Knol.

So what does this mean for your site? Well, apparently, if your competitor wanted to, they could copy your content onto their own Google Knol and possibly outrank you. The Google Knol will indicate that it is a copied page, but the way that the information is presented with the Google logo makes it that much more likely that the visitor will stop on that site and not move over to yours.

While you could use this technique to try and take away from a competitors site, if you’re ranking in the same term, you’ll find yourself competing even more so with an even bigger, possibly unbeatable opponent.

We’ll have to see what Google says about all this, because it’s not looking that great right now.

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