Comments on: Google Knol – Friend of bloggers or blog killer ?

By: mayank

mayank — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:45:03 +0000

@ Arvind : Thanks for stopping by and sharing your insight with us. Well Google’s idea is to ensure that they can display more and more adsense on the internet, no matter it’s with their own content or some body else’s.

@ Darren : Well, I completely agree to what you have said that it may effect the publishers when it comes to search engine traffic, however as you and john have always taught that one just doesn’t need to depend on search engine to ensure that traffic flows in. Also, in my personal experience I’ve seen that if you ensure that you have decent on page optimization and are posting decent posts then you are good to go in search engine and you can rank at the top.

Instead of just giving up for certain keywords, we can always use better search engine optimization techniques to come up in search results. Although, I will certainly agree that it will take up some decent amount of publisher’s time.

@ Praval : I certainly appreciate Darren’s analysis, however I’m just spreading what I learned from Darren himself and that is never give up and just post quality posts and you’ll definitely be a winner :) And as far as Search engine ranking are concerned, I’ve already mentioned in the reply to Darren’s comment that it’s really isn’t that tough (may be I can say that because I know some of the tricks applied by SEOs)

@ Aravind : May be that’s what I really don’t want to accept. Google has built a monopoly and I don’t want to accept that and I guess even they don’t accept it and that’s why they try to constantly improve their search engine. Well, I would also like to point out one thing and that is, it’s still not certain that if Google Knol will be a hit or will it be a miss. Google Q&A wasn’t a hit at any point of time and Yahoo Answers clearly ruled that space.

WikiPedia has been around for years and people are kind of used to it and apart from that there is a huge community which supports wikipedia and I’m sure everyone will agree to the fact that it’s really not easy to break communities, so if we look on that aspect, Google Knol may not even take off that well.

@ Vinamra : Agreed! I can’t be as sure as you are but I certainly think that Google Knol may have tough time in becoming as successful as Wikipedia.

By: Vinamra

Vinamra — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:45:17 +0000

I think Google Knol will fail soon as WikiPedia is cool and full of knowledge based articals.

By: Aravind Jose T.

Aravind Jose T. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:48:39 +0000

Google Knol, in itself, is not a blog/small-publisher killer.
But, as Darren said:

Me too am of the (exactly) same opinion as of Darren.

It’s good that who shares their knowledge. gets paid off.
And also, at times, it is necessary to have a database of information on many things together (like Wikipedia and Knol)

But, as Darren pointed out, as Google ventures into more and more aspects of the web, especially content producing and managing (they’re already successful in almost all other fields, either starting them on them own or aquiring best performed ones), AND GOOGLE BEING REGARDED AS “WHAT GUIDES THE WEB” , the web could surely be modified in any way (of theirs!! )
Do i sound like saying about Google’s Monopoly ? (Nothing wrong in ‘YES’)

[off-topic: Why was SmashingMagazine dumped out of Google Search?]

By: Praval Singh

Praval Singh — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:21:11 +0000

@Darren: That was an awesome analysis of the knol break through. I agree to what you said. I hope Mayank too would appreciate this.

If a service like knol which has the backup of Google behind it can hamper with Probogger.net’s traffic, what it shall do for smaller blogs, publishers, etc. is pretty obvious.

Let’s get our fingers crossed and watch the next move!

By: Darren

Darren — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:00:32 +0000

Perhaps my title suggests that I think it’ll ‘kill’ blogs – but I don’t. I do think it’ll hurt some though – in terms of their search rankings for competitive terms. For example I rank #2 behind Wikipedia for a couple of big terms and know that they take most of the traffic for those terms as a result. With Knol I half expect to be #3 for those terms in a year and as a result traffic will fall more.

It won’t kill my blog – but when a term that you rank #2 for sends 10,000 visitors a year and you fall to #3 and only get 5,000 (and this happens on a few terms) it does take away some potential new readers, income etc.

It’s not going to stop me blogging or grind things to a halt – but I guess I do think that on the scale that Google do things that it’ll have an impact upon small publishers across the board which will add up.

By: Arvind

Arvind — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:34:58 +0000

Think Knol will have the same contributors of Wikipedia. And these contributors may not be bloggers per se. Also, they form a very tiny community. Good for them as they get to make some money off their content. The plan sounds similar to what Calacanis did – woo top Diggers to Netscape Propeller.