Categories
Article Marketing HubPages

Knol: Competition for Squidoo and HubPages

Today Google launched their new service Knol. Speculation has been that Knol is an attempt of Google to take on Wikipedia at first glance I think Knol is actually closer to Squidoo or Hubpages.

Knol appears to be ambivalent on the commercial appeal of the site. Wikipedia has been robustly and adamantly non-commercial- deleting any page which is “commercial” in even the broadest terms. Knol of the other hand specifically allows knols that are about a commercial subject.

Knol even has Adsense and allows authors to keep 100% of Adsense revenues: but the placement of the single Adsense block is far right and below the fold, about as bad as you can get.

Knol seems to have a bit a flawed launch too. Some features appear to be glaringly missing: you can tell exactly how many versions of your knol that you have saved but there is no statistics and no way to link to Google’s Analytics.

Although they claim to want international authors: the only way to become a verified author is to have a US address associated with your credit card or phone number. I have a verified Adsense account – why is that not good enough for Knol? It’s not like they are ever going to add my New Zealand credit card to a database anytime soon!

Its also totally unclear as to what the advantage of being a verified author: though only verified author’s appear on the surprisingly static front page of featured knols.

Read my full review of Knol and Hubpages here


Categories
Back Links Marketing Search Engines

Backlinks are Everything.

I guess I am only just starting to learn the fine art of earning passive income online. One of the blind spots I had for a long time was that “content is king” – “write good stuff and they will come”. Well actually: they won’t, and in fact even when they do they may only make you 7c / day which is not going to see you retire in style any time soon.

There is only one  way for the bulk of your potential audience to find you: that is Google. Yes there are other search engines Yahoo probably sends me 5% of what Google does and MSN about 5 (no not % just 5 🙂 ). But Google is king of the search engines

You see Google don’t find your wonderful hub or article or website or blog by accident. It certainly doesn’t decide to put your site on the first page of results except for some very specific reasons.

  1. Google needs your content. Try this type “lis sowerbutts” – without the quotes into Google what comes back – this site normally ranks #1. At the moment in the Australian data centre of Google I rank #1 and #2 of 493,000 results: cool eh? Well no not really – lets face it “lis sowerbutts” isn’t exactly a high competition set of words – there aren’t that many sites around so I end up at the top because a) the name is in my url of this blog and b) and often comment and link to Lis Sowerbutts – an anchored link on the name of the blog
  2. Google thinks you have “authority”. Think about it if you have a problem with your car who do you call a: qualified mechanic or Uncle Ed who mucks around with motors –  OK, if they were both the same price you would call the “authority”. If you want the perfect smoked fish recipe do you check out Hub Pages or some site you never heard of: you go to Hub Pages because you know there is some great recipes there but even if I didn’t if I search via Google I will find hubpages often on the first page Why? Because Google “likes” Hub Pages. Which actually means that the Google algorithm basically gives Hub Pages the benefit of the doubt and indexes and ranks hubs quickly. Look carefully at what shows up most often on the first page of Google when you search for generic information: about.com, hubpages.com squidoo.com and almost always 1st or 2nd wikipedia.com. These sites have authority: just like you should listen to your Mum you should also probably listen to wikipedia or hubpages!

So how do you get that “authority” from Google? Well that is how

Backlinks are King

Try this: go to Google and type in

link:http://mywebsite.com

this will give you a list of all the sites which link back to your site.Well all the ones that google have got around to counting anyway, which can take anywhere from hours to months.

If you don’t have a profile or a website which has been around a few months try mine as an example link:http://hubpages.com/profile/Lissie
at the moment about 125 links. But look at those links: tags some of my hubs have, people I am a fan of, comments I have paid of hubs (my own or others), posts I have made in the forums. Being active on HubPages creates lots of backlinks to your profile and you can see the effect that my profile now has a Page Rank (PR) of 4. Basically the more links you have pointing at a page the more important Google considers it and the more likely you are to rank well in a search for that term.