Google Knol - Google's Latest Attack on Copyright

Aaron I'm with you. It just doesn't seem right that knol pages are ranking higher than pages on trusted sites that have been up way longer. Especially when the content is basically duplicated.

There definitely needs to be some serious investigation done here. Thanks for bringing this to light.

i agree with you aswell Aaron
i wrote a similar post on my vipey blog about this matter

it seems like Google is heavily favoring Knol to other sites in their serps

be interesting to see what happens in the future

Great Post Aaron!

It seems silly that their page should rank higher. I have to imagine that this changes at some point. As far as content goes, I am removing my Creative Commons limited non-commercial license to a full "all rights reserved."

I spend my time, energy, and yes money to own my content and I will be damned if someone is going to just take it while I let them! So, until the dust settles on this Knol thing, I have to pull my Creative Commons.

looks like your using personalized search from the screen shots, turn it off ehow gets the top spot

http://tinyurl.com/6r5zc6

Can I suggest this plugin for FF

http://yoast.com/seo-tools/disable-personalized-search-plugin/

Sadly the lightbulb won't go on for most ppl until it starts ranking for commercial terms in which case it will be too late.

Hi Graywolf
I just updated the screenshots to non-personalized ones.

Also, when the string is "in quotes" it returns some of those other sites, but if it is not in quotes all the other copies except Knol are filtered out for me unless I add &filter=0

IIRC this knol was featured the first day and it's ranking

http://tinyurl.com/5r488m

I had found that on the second day of Knol being open to the public if you were to search for toilet clogs on Google the Knol page ranked at number 5 over a much older wikihow article ranking at 6 . The only difference I could really find between the two articles was that (a)the wikihow article was much older (b)The Knol page is a Google property. This makes me think that the Google owned pages already get a bump up in the rankings simply because of who owns them.

All of which, sadly, is pretty much what we expected, no?

Must be nice to be 'inside' the farm, and not have to work for authority :(

This type of thing actually scares me. I get worried about the future of the internet if stolen content can get ranked higher than its original source. I own a site full of original content and to think it could just be taken and credit removed so easily makes me wonder ....

Great post Aaron and for all its worth, I prefer to buy books, software, music than get it for free.

I agree with all of your points, but when I read posts like this, I like to remember that Google's search is an algorithm, and I think you are talking at it as if it was a person.

There will always be inconsistencies in computer system of ranking pages and displaying content and for Google to sweat the details of every errand of seemingly unfair result would not be sustainable business, when there are gazillions of web pages.

All things considered, as much fun as it is for us SEOs to shake a stick at Google, it's safe to say they do a pretty great job...no?

Hey Aaron, about the site that was posting your ebook: we do proactively look for webspam, but typically not for copyright violations. Even though that guy appeared to be criticizing you, for all we know you and he could have had an agreement. That's why we normally wait until someone complains (via the DMCA process) about being copied. Just to be crystal-clear, you're saying that site is copying your book without your permission?

As far as "Google paid someone to steal it and wrap it in AdSense," if this is the incident I remember--that site was not only kicked out of Google's index, but the publisher was also banned from AdSense after you mentioned it.

Here's an idea. If knol pages are truly ranking so well, as they definitely appear to be - let's start writing some Knols about how it works.

Hopefully this corrects itself. I've been a fan & supporter of so much that Google does, I would hate to see them undermine it all by starting to favor their own content.

It all makes you at least consider the huge conflict of interest if the authority on searching and ranking content can become a creator and publisher of content.

There is no better incentive than what your post points out here. Thanks for sharing your findings.

If you want to know where your content is going, including seobook.blogspot.com, don't hesitate to contact me.

Attributor is focused on the opportunity (e.g. link building, ad share) of content re-use, but we have several customers who also use us to stop recurring stealing of their content.

Rich
http://www.attributor.com/link_building_beta

Interesting post.
I think your being slightly over critical on something this yoyung Aaron but you still have a point, if Google is just going to rank Knols automatically what's the point in trying to rank for any specific term when I could just create a knol on a variation of the keyword and let Google do the work?

This devalues both their search engine and their new product and I hope Google can take the time to see that.

Equally however I don't think it's Googles fault that someone copied your book up there Aaron, loads of people steal ebooks and virtual content, I am sure you know of other places your book has been circulated for free?

In response to Matt's comment about having to submit a complaint;
Don't you feel this is a reactive rather than proactive to people both producing webspam, manipulating results and your adsense program? Surely their is a middle ground solution that would filter some of the lazy spammers out.

Interesting post indeed...there's no doubt that Google loves their in-house stuff and gives it a little extra juice in the SERPS.

Aaron, did you do any link building for the Knol you created to get it indexed quickly and ranked high?

Or did you simply publish it in the Knol system and bammo...there it was ranking high in no time flat for "seo basics"?

Although, "seo basics" per SEOBKWT has it around 4 searches per day so very low search and competition at 362k results...I wonder how well a Knol does for a competitive term?

John

Hi John
I mentioned it in a blog post on this site. It also picked up a few other links from other sites, but I didn't think it was enough to have it compete with the Work.com and Business.com pages, especially given that it was brand new and essentially duplicate content.

Aaron, I got into webspam because it really irked me and I wanted to improve Google's quality. Over time I've worked with the AdSense folks and the AdSense team has driven a lot of spam out of AdSense. Copyright is further afield for me, and although it's an important area, it's also a complex area (not even starting to tackle how copyright is handled in different languages). When things veer into legal areas I normally leave that up to other Googlers who know more than me.

I will ask someone from Blogger about the blog that you mentioned though and ask them to investigate it.

Matt I would like to hear your opinion on Knol rankings, do you believe Knol should automatically rank because you believe it a controlled source of information or do you think it's insta-rankings are unfair and should be adjusted?

Do you agree that abundant Knol rankings (as with any similar site including Wikipedia) devalues Google search?

I don't want to make Google or the Knol project "the bad guy" but look at it from a w/h SEO point of view, it's an unfair playing field and it WILL drive people to spam and blackhat.

yes, you are right. Google is biased and can be exploited. Like any winner it is biased. Instead of blaming just duplicate your content summary, post it in Knol and direct visitors to your site and the strategy works wonders. Many times we cant stop the big bulls but can ride on them :D

To sum up my previous comments about Google being an algorithm I guess I really don't agree with this statement:

"house content is favored by the Google algorithm"

I think that if you create a subdomain off of any PageRank 10 domain, it's results are going to rank highly. I just don't see the conspiracy her.

(btw. "Email me about replies to this comment." doesn't seem to be working)

I think that if you create a subdomain off of any PageRank 10 domain, it's results are going to rank highly. I just don't see the conspiracy here.

That in an of itself is a form of a bias. By the rating system they created they leveraged their market position into a position that only a few dozen sites are in and then leverage it to promote other verticals or businesses.

And universal search *does* operate outside the traditional web graph. They didn't start aggressively featuring YouTube videos in the search results until after they bought YouTube. That *is* favoring house content and house business objectives in the organic search results.

I will look into the email reply link.

Aaron,

It's automatic - we can grab your RSS/Atom feed or crawl your site.

After this, you just log-in and you can see which sites are using your content, how much of it has been copied (expressed as % and number of words), if a link is present and if advertising is on the page.

With this info, you decide to request a link, ask for licensing or ad share or, as last resort, send a DMCA notice. All three of these actions can be done through our platform.

I'm happy to set you up with an account if you want to check it out.

Rich

Sure Rich. I would love to give it a try. :)

Thanks Rich :)

Hi Aaron,

very interesting (in a not-so-positive way).

What is going to keep Google from turning the internet into Googlenet/leveraging their market position to get people to create content for them in their network instead of the real internet?

Could something like that ever happen or is it highly unlikely/impossible because of certain factors?

"That's why we normally wait until someone complains (via the DMCA process) about being copied"

The trouble is do you know how involved the DMCA process is?

Additionally, you have to declare that you've sent notification to the offender - but try doing that to someone stealing your work and publishing it to an anonymously registered and hosted domain.

I've sent notices via Adsense ads of what's going on, but Google Adsense play at being dumb when that happens. As Aaron says, so long as Google benefits, Google does drag its feet on the issue.

If Google Adsense need a DMCA just to take any form of action on stolen content, even though the content can clearly be referenced to an original source as an exact copy, then this is plain lazy.

I like Google: I respect Google for what it aspires to, and I am happy to try and work within Google's boundaries - but when other people refuse to, engage in blatant acts of theft, and Google does nothing punitive but instead collects Adsense earnings, this can only develop bad feeling for the future.

2c.

We all expected Knol to boost rankings for its hosted content, original or not. What surprised me is that publishing on Knol does not automatically put you into Knol's search results; apparently, articles are subject to manual approval or disapproval by Google employees.

I thought this recent Knol post on Sphinn was just a joke, but it now seems frighteningly prescient.

The main that I wanted to get at, and again don't take this wrong, but I'm pissed off how Google treats A list bloggers compared to everyone else. The fact that Matt Cutts actually comes down from the Google heavens to address your complaints and even offers to help you deal with the copyright infringement without you having to submit a DMCA is annoying to me. I don't think it's your fault at all for that, but I think it's annoying that Google has no means or line of communication for smaller or medium sites, only sites it deems as having strategic importance to please.

It's far easier for someone such as yourself, to get information about your site being penalized or a site stealing your content, then it is for any other webmaster without as much significance or popularity from Google. I think this is a serious issue that Google needs to work on, and again I don't blame you or Matt for this, it's a serious problem with Google's transparency.

To just give an example, Yahoo has a paid option for them to look in to your site. The fact that is available is nice, but again I don't think people should have to pay to know the status of their site in the index. But again I can understand. What I don't like however is having to have a certain level of percieved importance by Google to find out why your content is being allowed on a blog or Google run program like blogger or googlepages.

iBrian, we try to make the process of doing a DMCA complaint pretty straightforward, without creating an incentive in the wrong direction where someone can easily spam DMCA requests to remove the competition. Usually the first DMCA request feels a little harder, but after that people realize that the process is actually pretty simple.

Diablos, I commented on Knols over on Dare's post at http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=7fb38fd2-a79d-41... .

Thanks for the link Matt, your comment was interesting and did make sense, I hope that these initial examples of knol's ranking so well in a short time are just effects of publicity and discussion, I suppose time will tell.

That in an of itself is a form of a bias. By the rating system they created they leveraged their market position into a position that only a few dozen sites are in and then leverage it to promote other verticals or businesses.

I am in half agreement with both of you regarding this.

On one side I can totally understand that users will want to see big companies like Google, Adobe etc providing them with solutions to the products they are searching about BUT no company should have the opportunity to create infinite branches and get awesome ranks because of who they are.

Aaron, do you believe that users are expecting to see search results from recognised brands or do you think they would enter more specific search queries for this requirement?

@richpearson - certainly sounds like something worth considering - feel free to find me at InternetBusiness.co.uk.

@Matt - thanks for the comments. I sincerely appreciate Google's attempts to ensure their decisions are fair - I'll look at options to streamline my own work process for future DMCA violations and see if that helps.

Not sure it's also of interest to you, but are you aware that some advertisers are using Adwords to libel other companies? The only way to fight this is seems to be to take Google to the UK High Court, pay major court fees, and even Google's own legal fees, just to even identify who the libellous advertiser is. Not good when on the receiving end, not good for Google's reputation, but very good for nasty cowards hiding behind the skirts of a billion-dollar corporation. 2c.

I think that if you create a subdomain off of any PageRank 10 domain, it's results are going to rank highly. I just don't see the conspiracy her.

Then if the conspiracy theory does not work from your standpoint, perhaps for you it will be ok that spammers use Google groups (subdomains and directories) to spam Google rankings in their own benefit?

Likewise, using Google’s leverage through Knol to corner the heart of the www with information only they consider *appropriate* is pretty blind sided IMO. Are we talking about a new form of web socialism or communism with a twisted ingredient named financial capability and acquisition power?

Perhaps I am too naive to believe that communism has disappeared from the face of earth.

I would love to hear Matt’s take on this issue that seems pretty unbalanced and goes against democratic principles on the web. Yes, I read Matt's comment about their crawl/indexing system taking some time to figure out Knol's new positioning, but for how long?

Yes, I read Matt's comment about their crawl/indexing system taking some time to figure out Knol's new positioning, but for how long?

What is weird about ranking them right away is that I thought that when search engines were in doubt they typically took a wait and see approach rather than ranking them right away and then checking the consumer response (after all, that is why SEOs talk about the "Google Sandbox" phenomena).

I noticed that Yahoo was ranking knols highly for several days as soon as Knol launches. It looked like around Sunday night Yahoo (or Yahoo's crawl system) must have changed because I didn't see knols ranking in Yahoo as highly after that.

Over Rules:
http://www.google.ro/search?hl=ro&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fknol.google.com%...

No Comments :D !

Amazing that the site is a week old and they are already indexing search results on it. Given that they host the content you wouldn't think that they would need to do that.

The Google Knol I created on the 24th of July entitled 'How to Read the Russian Alphabet in 75 Minutes' was already appearing on Page 1 of a Google Search for "read russian" with 12,300,000 results following.

I have updated the title within Knol from the one showing in the Google index, but that's still a pretty rapid ranking. I also created a derivative Knol, which was based on content that appears inside a PDF on one of my sites that is open to Google, and it correctly flagged it up as '75% similar', but for some reason, the Knol is not showing in search at all - even within Knol.

The gaming and black hat will of course be well underway, and I've alsready laughed at an info-product which is a "New Insider's Report on making a profit with the Knol™ Project that most Succesful Internet Marketers DON'T want you to see... offering to divulge such secrets as "How to Get other people writing for your gain - The Industry secret that allows you to Take all the credit for somebody elses work and still get paid time and time again!" Yadda yadda first 100 at special price of only...

The fact that one has to have an author for content I think will be the key to credibility and to limiting splogging. Qyuite how that mechanism will work, only time will tell, but I think Google can be more clever about "verifying" people's identity using its own systems like Google Checkout, Adsense, or openID.

It's going to be interesting, and I think Google has to be careful in several respects. One gap I think they need to fill is to create a community for Knol authors. I see that as a big FAIL not having simple mechanism in place for that - it could even rejuvenate Orkut.

I really like those Knols and think they are great for people who are new to the web and don't know a lot about web publishing in general. But why would we want to give them such a powerful tool that gives them an advantage right away?
And why do we need yet another platform for people to spend more time rewriting the same material rather than having everything in one place and focus on quality.
Either the Knol team creates something that turns Knols into a social network superior over the others, or I do forsee this becoming yet another blogspot type of tool decreasing the quality of the overall search results.

Mike Dammann

even Google feels the economy's bite !!!

GOOG vs YHOO vs MSFT -> http://blog.4rev.net/2008-07/goog-vs-yhoo-vs-msft/

no more fun for GOOG now !

"pretty unbalanced and goes against democratic principles on the web"

LOL. I guess that is naïve premise that this argument is being based on.

It's like saying that McDonalds is going to start serving healthy food since it would be better for the overall well being of America.

Google is a business. Their SOLE responsibility is to make money for their shareholders. That and that alone is why they (and every other public company) exist. It is completely within their mandate to favor themselves in any manner.

I wouldn't confuse them with some pseudo government organization that is supposed to operate by doing what would be in the best interest of the public.

DigitalBiographer, if you add quotes to ["read russian"] I only see 123,000 results for that query, so it doesn't surprise me that much that you can rank at #9 with a knol. I believe that you also ranked on the first page of Yahoo very quickly, until Yahoo adjusted it's rankings for knol on Sunday night.

byrev, the query [site:knol.google.com/search] doesn't return any knol search results, but thanks for pointing out that deeper url. I'll pass that feedback on.

Aaron, I had a few pages rank well for a couple days but now they are gone so I don't think this is going to the problem you suggest - worth watching though - I'm thinking Wikipedia pages are the ones that might suffer more.

Their SOLE responsibility is to make money for their shareholders.

Isn’t that what Milton Friedman wrote about 30+ years ago in the NY Times Magazine? Mind you this is 2008 and things have changed. What is more impressive is that you took it beyond Friedman’s philosophy by adding

It is completely within their mandate to favor themselves in any manner.

WOW! The new corporate doctrines talk about social and ethical responsibilities on top of the financial stewardship. Business Schools were the first ones to embrace these concepts right after the corporate scandals like Enron and other crocks.

Any public corporation is responsible to their constituencies, stakeholders, and is subject to laws and regulations. Laws are promoted by public representatives, who are ultimately elected by members of our society representing the interest of the people and adhering to principles of protection and servitude. If the laws are not upheld, any predator corporation will set up shop and start screwing people up following the old say “the end justifies the means.”

For good or bad, the laws and decision making are manipulated by personal/corporate interest and greed. We’ve seen that with the oil and gas industry and now with companies in the technology field.

Because of my background in the corporate and governmental sectors, I strongly believe that socially responsible businesses are the core of any economy and society. Moreover, I also give merit to non-for-profit organizations that contribute in many ways to the betterment of communities.

On those lines, I don’t believe Google is some lame corporation trying to make a quick buck online by manipulating their audience with pseudo effective internet marketing methods like other smaller companies do. Google has done great things, no doubt! But if they are aspiring to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” then they should also be ready to be held to higher standards just like judges or congressmen are held in the US Justice and Legislative Systems.

This is even more important if Google pretends to police and oversee the morals and behavior of the web. Even Matt has been very outspoken about Lyndoman (Lyndon Antcliff) viral piece. Is there anything wrong with his perspective? Absolutely no. Perhaps other people don’t share that same opinion.

But what about users and shareholders in equation? Like probably some here, I am too a Google shareholder. So, I do have the right to voice my opinion and concerns like anybody else. I just don’t agree with the way they are handling some things, especially Knol’s SERP ranking.

From a web user standpoint, complains about Adsense scrapers using duplicate content that is not attributed to the source are well known. There are many other issues that are not addressed promptly by Google because is not in their best interest. Sadly, the ones who know about those exploits use them to benefit themselves. Would the same philosophy of

It is completely within their mandate to favor themselves in any manner

apply to those manipulating Google’s rankings?

Nice advocacy for entropy. Be my guest.

In the more than 40 years of Internet history, at least some core values need to be preserved. Democracy on the web should be one of them. Leaders like Google shall give the example by walking the talk!

Update:
I forgot to include a link to Bill Slawski's recent post about Social Responsibility and the Small Business that anyone should read.

If you think Google is about user experience and how that's related to "Quality of the Web"- think again.

Google's sole mission is to make MONEY.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt had a seizure when MSN tried to create competition through the purchase of Yahoo.

Competition that would guarantee better a "user experience".

An example of Google's fake altruism is noted with this knol thread and another with YouTube SERP rankings.

How does a 20 second, affiliate marketing, power point presentation in a very blurry YouTube result in a quality user experience?

See past the mantra of Google.

The mega multi national corp is no different than Exxon or Mobile oil.

Google doesn't care one iota about who actually created the content. This is already quite telling based on how frequently Google WRONGLY ranks duplicates above originals in their search results. If that isn't enough, then check out this post from Nelson Minar, an engineer at Google.

Now, I understand his issues with the NBC / Olympic site, and I'll grant that he makes some valid points in his post about how unusable the NBC site is. It's not what he says that is important. It's how he says it. In the first two sentences of the second paragraph, he complains that NBC's copyrighted content is not available on YouTube, which is absurd.

There's a difference between organizing the world's information and channeling people to a duplicate site just because you don't like the presentation of the originator (or, as the case may be, you don't own it or it doesn't run AdSense ads).

If the presentation of a site is bad, people won't use it. The original site will have to change, or it will go out of business.

However, this doesn't give *anyone* the right to steal the content from the originator and post it somewhere else.

In Google, though, content is king, even if it is on a site that is trafficking in stolen goods. Until Google gets it right, protect your content.

There's a difference between organizing the world's information and channeling people to a duplicate site just because you don't like the presentation of the originator (or, as the case may be, you don't own it or it doesn't run AdSense ads).

You and I get this, but how long will it take the mainstream media to get this?

However, this doesn't give *anyone* the right to steal the content from the originator and post it somewhere else.

And this is part of what makes Google's moral superiority strategy so absurd...they pay anyone to steal anything and then even after it is announced in a public way they chose to ignore it unless they think it costs them on the public relations front.

In Google, though, content is king, even if it is on a site that is trafficking in stolen goods. Until Google gets it right, protect your content.

Copyright holders get to spend lots of time and money protecting their business from Google, which strategically attempts to undermine copyright. Not a good way for Google to get on the good side of the people who spent the most money creating the best content.

Just wanted to say I followed your example and published an article on both Knol and Work.com, and I'm very happy I did.

http://knol.google.com/k/jaime-bonet/translation-service-solutions/3aetv...
http://www.work.com/language-translation-services-16002/

I also went ahead and gave you a couple of good ratings and comments on your own articles, not that you need them but still. ;)

Cheers,

Jaime

Thanks for the ratings and comments Jamie :)

I'm the VP of Marketing for WonderHowTo, a new but fast growing (2.5mm monthly uniques) startup in the how-to space.

While Google sends us much of our traffic, as we plan to go into the text how-to space in early '09 it's a little disconcerting that they're getting into the content business, and possibly tipping the scales in their favor.

Although I think a big part of the problem is that every tech blogger (and some regular bloggers too) will cover everything that Google does--sort of an idol worship(use nofollow people!) which would explain why knol has a homepage rank of 7 while most of it's content and sections have no page rank at all.

But overall, we can't fall into the trap of believing that Google runs the internet. Webmasters run the internet. If Google ever steps over the line webmasters will band together and choose a new search engine.

This seems unbelievable but remember when everyone got tired of IE (4 years ago or so?) and you couldn't go on a website without seeing a button urging you to download/use firefox?

If Google ever steps over the line webmasters will band together and choose a new search engine.

but most influential commercial sites are at least in part reliant on Google services. and most non-commercial sites have webmasters that use at least one Google service (ads, search, email, analytics, youtube, etc etc etc)