Your knol, review or collection will only be visible to readers after you decide to publish it. Unpublished pages are visible to their owners, authors and invited reviewers only.
Publishing
You can publish your knol, review or collection by clicking "Publish" in the author toolbox.
Caution: if you publish a new knol prematurely, before you have spent time formatting and polishing your work, you may accumulate negative ratings and and reviews. If your work is incomplete, consider either leaving it unpublished, or else mark it very prominantly that it is a "Work in progress - not ready for review".
Publishing a Moderated Collection applies any special appearance to the knols within that collection. Publishing a Moderated Collection also adds the navigation banner to each knol in that collection.
Publishing a non-moderated collection has no effect on the publishing state of the knols that it contains. It only changes whether or not the collection appears in the list of uses for this page search in the right-hand-side of all knols and collections.
Publishing a review for the first time will send a notification to the owners and authors of the reviewed knol (if they have notifications enabled) and will list your review in that knol's review section.
Unpublishing
If it becomes necessary to unpublish a knol, review or collection, you can do so by choosing:
Settings > Unpublish/Delete > Unpublish.
Settings > Unpublish/Delete > Unpublish.
You can also delete knols, if you want to remove them forever.
Unpublishing Collections
Unpublishing a Moderated Collection removes any special appearance to the knols within that collection and also removes the navigation banner from each knol in that collection.
Unpublishing a non-moderated collection has no effect on the publishing state of the knols that it contains.
Before you unpublish permanently, please repair broken links
If other knols or collections link to yours, those links will be broken by the removal of your page. You can find the list of such pages by clicking on the link: Search for uses of this page which is found on the right hand side below the "Also Wrote" and Related Knols lists. If the pages which link to the to-be-unpublished page are yours, or in open or moderated collaboration modes, you can fix them directly. Unpublishing past versions
You may unpublish aspecific past versions as follows:
- Go to the Revisions tab
- Click on the link with the version number you want to unpublish. This will navigate you to an older version of the document. You should be able to confirm that it is an older version with a message such as the following: This is an old version. View: Latest
- In the control panel where you normally see the "Publish" or "Unpublish" button, you will instead see this message: This old version is published. Unpublish this version
At this time there is no fast way to unpublish all previous versions of a document while leaving just the latest visible.
Once you have published a knol, review or collection, any revisions you make to it are also immediately published.
Most authors are content to let the public see their document's revisions.
Working with Unpublished Drafts
Most authors are content to let the public see their document's revisions.
Working with Unpublished Drafts
However, if you want to work through a series of major revisions without exposing your intermediary drafts to the public, create a second knol, called for example "Draft Copy of <your title>". Keep that unpublished and make your updates to it. Then when the revisions are ready to share with the public, copy and paste the content into the published knol.
FAQs about Publishing
How long does it take for the public to see a published knol, review or collection?
The answer varies depending on what part of the system we are talking about. The time estimates here are approximates, but if you see behavior greatly different, let us know.- Visibility to the Search Toolkit: : seconds, to a minute or so.
An article becomes visible via the Search Toolkit just as fast as on the knol.google.com home page.
- Visibility on Google.com search: usually days, sometimes never.
The Knol website is treated the same as any other large, commercial website by google.com search. It will generally take a few days for new documents to become visible on google.com, but not all pages may be readily findable. Creation of a knol, review or collection is by no means a guarantee of competitiveness in google.com search rankings. In fact, we explicitly discourage some overly commercial content as described in our Content Policy. Pages that are duplicates of other web content, or that are "spammy", or that are very short in length, may be blocked from appearing.
For a simple introduction on how Google ranks web pages, see this Google Technology Overview. If you are interested in how to make web content more findable in general, you can visit Google's Webmaster Guidelines page. If you publish on Knol, you get the benefit that we automate many of the best practices for making web pages search engine friendly.
- Visibility in the What's New panel, on the home page: seconds, to a minute or so.
Once you publish, it should be available within seconds to a minute or so on the knol.google.com/k "What's new" tab (or its country-specific variants such as knol.google.co.kr/k). As more documents are published, yous may be pushed off the list of the most recent 10.
The "What's new" banner section on the homepage contains a subset, but not all of the new knols, reviews or collections found in the "What's new" tab.
You can make yous easier to find if you assign it to categories, use appropriate keywords in the subtitle and summary areas, and otherwise follow our best practices for writing knols.
- Visibility in the four spotlight knols across the top of the page, or in the featured knols
The spotlight and featured knols appear prominently on the Knol home page. These are chosen by an automated process out of a pool of higher quality knols. The spotlight knols refresh constantly and the featured knols refresh daily. - Visibility in the category browser: about a day or two after adding categories, a bit slow.
The category browser appears on the left hand side of search results. If you want your knol, review or collection to be findable by someone exploring using the categories, make sure you label it with appropriate categories. - Visibility in the directory. Pages in the middle to high quality range appear in the directory, linked to by the browse link on the bottom of the home page. This directory is not especially user-friendly. We intend that readers find published knols, reviews and collections primarily by search, not by visiting the directory. (Why do we even have the directory? To assure that documents get crawled by search engines.)
(This particular Q&A section also appears under Knol Search).
How can I increase my chances of having my knol featured?
Make sure you follow our Best Practices, Content Policy, and Terms of Service. Write unique, high-quality content. Keep you content fresh, and accurate. Make good use of images, links to useful resources, and authoritative citations. Request that your knols be reviewed by established authors. Collaborate with other, high quality or previously featured authors.
How many knols have been published?
We don't provide an official number, but there are two easy ways you can estimate the number.
- Look at the number of search results that google.com returns for the search [site:knol.google.com]
- Look at the number of search results that the Search Toolkit returns for a common word in a language of interest. For example, search for [a].
Using either technique, you can estimate the number of published knols in a particular language by restricting the search to a particular language.
How much traffic is my knol getting? Are "Page Views" accurate?
We indicate an estimate of your all-time traffic, and your traffic over approximately the last week. Example:
Traffic estimates are approximate; there are some factors which may cause some traffic (such as bots and spiders) to not be counted.
An author's own visits or edits are counted as page views.
We update the Page Views once a day, but these intervals may vary. There is generally a delay of a day or so from the time a page receives traffic to the time we reflect it.
We have occasionally experienced longer delays -- we will investigate whether we can make Page Views more timely.
We have occasionally experienced longer delays -- we will investigate whether we can make Page Views more timely.
Norman Creaney
Invite as author
pageviews after unpublish-republish
On republishing, the pageview count shown within the knol remained accurate but the count shown from the outside - i.e. here:
http://knol.google.c
seemed to be reset back to (near) zero. I know these statistics can sometimes be a bit stale so I waited but - after about a week - the statistics are still inconsistent. I'm just letting you know in case this is a bug that needs attention.
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Alberto Menapace
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I cannot find my published knoll
If I use the Search Toolkit I can see your knol using its title as query [Enterprise 2.0: L’imprenditore web-based]. It also shows up as result 6 for the query [Enterprise 2.0]. Can you see it following this link?
http://knol.google.c
We have not indexed you yet using the Custom Search Engine (which is the search used on the knol.google.com home page, and is actually a separate search engine from the Search Toolkit.). But that should come soon.
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Bobbie7
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Unpublish previous versions of a Knol
I followed your instructions on how to unpublish a previous version of my Knol and it doesn't seem to work. I only get the option to delete my Knol.
Can you help?
Thanks
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Arun Ramanathan
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How do I delete older versions of the knol and only keep the current knol.
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Mandar Deodhar
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Untitled
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Nancy Kamp
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Deleting a knol
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http://knol.google.c
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