Follow vs. Nofollow Links in Knol

I could reiterate the following best practices for you :
* Follow our Content Policy http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/content-policy/si57lahl1w25/13#
* Follow our Best Practices http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/best-practices-writing-good-knols/uPUoECxfx/sd8yvy#
* Beware of performing behavior that is "spammy". Produce knols that serve the public and not a narrow commercial interest. Avoid bulk uploading of non-unique content.
* Be patient, as our signals do fluctuate over time, and it may take a while for a new user to accrue some trustworthiness.
* If you know that you satisfy all of the above, you can contact us at knolhelp@google.com and report it as a possible bug.

Currently meta tags are from the first words of the knols. We cannot comment on whether it would change. You may want to read more at http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/knol-under-the-hood/si57lahl1w25/73#

I am writting a course on portfolio management and publishing it for Knol. I am one of the top authors in Spanish language, I created a google and a facebook group to encourage collaboration in Knol which is used by authors to share ideas. I help Spanish authors with all kind of problems such as content policy and best practices. I have translated (manually) many help articles into Spanish before some of them were available in this language and I still have some of them originally translated.

I hope it is a bug. Thanks!

Jesús Martín,

I'm really glad you brought this to our attention. After closer inspection, we did find a critical flaw in the algorithm that determines the "follow'ability" of any particular knol and author. We hope to have the fix to this problem deployed in the next few days. I'll update this thread once it's live and you can verify that the knols of concern are correctly being "followed".

Thank you very much William,

I'm really glad I got your attention! I have checked there were some features which had problems in Spanish interface but not in the English one (recently the references feature in the editor), if you wish you can tell me by e-mail or a comment new features when updating. (I know I should check Knol Announcements and Release Notes, but it is sometimes hard to remember periodically) I can also show new features on the Groups.

Another important issue is about the metatags. Previously there were a cell where we could entry keywords. These keywords remain currently on the metatags of the old knols while after the "keywords cell" dissapeared, the metatags are taken from the summary. The "categories feature" as a "social organization" is great, but so far it is more important the information for search engine Google, isn't it?

Changing SEO policies about Knol is a hidden damage on its position in Google searches. It is one of the most important criticism on Knol. I think the policy must be clear for authors and they should be able to choose (if they want) metatags, but it is quite different to a summary.

Thank you very much for your quick answer and your hard work!

We recently removed meta tags from knols that were created with the "keywords" feature. Now, all knols should be treated equally with regard to meta tags.

Great!

Then, the applied metatags for
meta name="description" content=
Will be the summary as it is being done?
And what about keywords?

Thank you a lot!

Maybe I am excessively worrying about metatags, I am not a SEO expert but anything that could improve the traffic for Knol is a necessary added value to Knol as it is going, that's what I think.

Greets

The <meta name="description" /> tag is already handled for every knol. We will no longer support the <meta name="keywords" /> tags and are comfortable with loosing any real or perceived SEO value they may or may not have.

Hello Rico and thanks for your feedback. I'll relay the suggestion back to the team (about giving some kind of indicator of where you are, or a todo list of things you can do to help) but for now search knol for "how to write good knols good knols" and you'll find several very detailed articles that may help.

No, the "follow" vs. "nofollow" decision is made algorithmically. We will work to improve our algorithms over time.

If you see examples of knol pages of exemplary quality which fail to use "follow" View Source, let us know! Conversely if you see examples of obviously low quality / spammy knols which fail to use "nofollow", please tell us.

Hello Distrabit Ltd,

We want to make an appropriate and thoughtful choice between "follow" vs "nofollow".

If you look back on our home page, we give this definition "A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic."

We indeed do want to reward any content that resembles that definition. But we certainly do not want to reward just any content.

I very much agree with this comment you provided, I just hope that it doesn't have to get to the stage that wikipedia.org got to where there was so much abuse the the nofollow tag had to be added. Anyway good luck with the development of google knol, It seems to be a very easy to use website with I am sure will do very good for google. :)

- Web Development team - www.distrabit.com

We do have some pages that are noindex, some that are nofollow. (All are generally noodp.)

In cases where we don't want to indicate the "no" states we could drop those tags and save some bytes.

Thanks for the suggestion. Search precision probably could be improved by making some parts of the page non-indexed.

We have a similar that came up with respect to improving AdSense targetting in Knol.

http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/1ng4pryc7bgdb/6#comment-1ng4pryc7bgdb.3jws6a

What is a <noindex> tag?

The "trust" is an algorithmic decision not a human decision. Like any search ranking problem it involves a large number of factors, which are subject to change or tuning at any time. "follow" vs "nofollow" will probably fluctuate a great deal in the coming months. Our objective in tuning our policy is to improve user's search experience, and to make the best content more readily findable.

Sorry, Gregory, if we cannot be more specific about the factors involved. But -- do feel free to offer suggestions if you think they will benefit the experience of both searchers and authors.

Cheers,

Michael McNally writing as Knol Help (signed this one time since the anonymous "we" bothered you.)

Author-created links within knols are all treated the same, whether they point to Knol or to any other site. Either the page gets a blanket "follow" or "nofollow" directive.