It’s been compared off and on to Wikipedia, we were teased with its inception back in 2007 and today Google Knol has become a reality for industry and niche experts all around the world.  While the public availability of Google Knol is warmly welcomed by internet marketers worldwide – are there any downsides to this new information-based service?

Google Knol –advice from industry experts, or biased marketers?

Google Knol is a user-generated content service, a service where anybody in the world with a Google account can contribute to the open-community project. And, while some articles within Knol’s pages are community-moderated, users have the option to disallow others from editing their articles. In all honesty, there is a great potential for “abuse” by savvy marketers - either the creation of guised spam pages or patently false information that cannot be modified by third parties.

Now, the potential for abuse is severely limited if Google’s Knol service doesn’t “get off the ground”, so to speak, and has limited exposure in search engines’ results. However, considering the fact that Google Knol is a variation of Wikipedia and the fact that this is a Google Service - the chances are slim-to-none that Google Knol will somehow avoid receiving significant amount of exposure in the SERP.  And, something that could heighten the potential for abuse is if Google happens to give their Knol service a tiny pinch of algorithmic love – who’s to say that Google Knols won’t outrank established and trusted content instantly? After all, it is a Google service - why wouldn’t Google inherently trust the content on their own servers more than content hosted on third-party websites?

Truth be told – most of this is mere speculation at the moment as Google Knol just officially launched today. Nobody really knows the weight or exposure that Google Knol will have and only Google really knows if their Knol service will earn automatic trust in their heavily relied-upon search results. A topic we haven’t touched on, though -

SEO and Google Knol – what will it mean?

While there are visible similarities between Wikipedia and Google Knol – for all intents and purposes, it’s a completely different type of service; namely it’s a user-generated content service being offered and hosted for free by the most popular search engine in the world. If Google Knols get any form of favor from the search engine giant - there could be major repercussions for search engine optimizers and website owners world-wide.

Again, it’s all mere speculation at this point, but as website owners and internet marketers, Google’s Knol service has a significant amount of potential, both good and bad.  Only time will tell which route this new service will take.