Google launched Knol as an alternative to the popular Wikipedia. But unlike wikipedia, Knol does not allow anonymous posting and modification of entries by others. Authors get full credit for their individual work. And your writing gets indexed on Google and the other search engines. And there may be money in it if authors let Google put ads on their work.
Here’s the skinny:
The Knol project is a site that hosts many knols — units of knowledge — written about various subjects. The authors of the knols can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit peer reviews and comments. Users can provide feedback, comments, and related information. So the Knol project is a platform for sharing information, with multiple cues that help you evaluate the quality and veracity of information.
Knols are indexed by the big search engines, of course. And well-written knols become popular the same as regular web pages. The Knol site allows anyone to write and manage knols through a browser on any computer.
You can write on any topic, even if another person has already covered the subject. You can even write in different languages.
The real estate section is wide open (only 39 entries), so be an early adopter. You know all those great consumer oriented answers you put on Trulia Voices– turn them into Knols. Now you’re covering 2 big bases when a consumer does a real estate related search.
The question arises: will you get better SEO writing on Knol? Google says they don’t play favorites but searchengineland’s Danny Sullivan did a little experiment.
“I found one third of the pages listed on the Knol home page that I tested ranked in the top results,” he writes. “I came away feeling that being on Knol does indeed give pages an advantage they might not get if they’d been hosted on some other brand new website.”
Sources and Further Reading: Telegraph (UK), Searchengineland, Knol.
Technorati Tags: real estate marketing, knol, wikipedia
