Month: July 2008

Matt Cutts announces new Google Toolbar Pagerank coming

Posted by Robert Gentel – July 24, 2008

Matt Cutts, a Google engineer who leads their webspam team announced that Google is updating their tool bar Page rank soon.

What is “toolbar Pagerank”?

In the good ole days of SEO Google’s index was periodically updated, and the SEOs all rushed to check out their Pagerank and positions. Back then the correlation between the two was much bigger, and the Pagerank in the toolbar was what a lot of SEO professionals fixated on.

Over time, Google got better at discerning the context of pages and rankings depended a lot less on the url’s general Pagerank and Google also started delaying their tool bar Pagerank while beginning to constantly calculate the ranks. One of the reasons Google does this is to make it harder for SEOs to manipulate their rankings, as the feedback is delayed and it’s harder to tell what worked or didn’t work.

So now Google periodically (every 3-4 months) takes a snapshot of their Pagerank data and pushes it out to the public through the toolbar (and the various other sites that query their toolbar servers). For more information read Matt’s explanation here.

Google Knol now open to everyone

Posted by Robert Gentel – July 23, 2008

Google’s Knol service is being billed as a Wikipedia killer, and while it has its similarities in purpose it has differences in implementation that set it apart. First of all, the Knols (individual units of knowledge) are not as open as Wikipedia. Individuals can collaborate in groups but you can also make control your own knol and be its sole contributor.

In practice this means that there can be many Knol articles about the same subject and this will mean less consolidation and more diversity. The mission statements are very different as well, and you don’t need to write with a neutral point of view on a Knol and can produce original research. You can probably post a lot of pure garbage that wouldn’t be allowed on Wikipedia on a Knol.

The effect that I predict that this will have is that Knols will be more like individual web pages than a Web Encyclopedia. And they are going to tend to be more commercial and less academic without the encyclopedic purpose and with the revenue sharing of Adsense ads that they will offer their contributors.

Expect a SEO heavy crowd in the early stages. This is going to be more like blogging that Wikipedia in effect.