Go! Go! Go! Green light for Google travel content [Knol]

Google Knol went live today.

A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic. Think Google’s answer to Wikipedia - except that you, as an individual or business, can publish your own articles and then decide:

• Whether to let other people edit your articles - or retain “expert”, single author, status
• The license for the content (All rights reserved vs various Creative Commons licenses)

However one of the most interesting aspects is that on your own pages you can add your own Google Adsense code….i.e. you can monetise your content.

Here is an example travel content article: How to backpack

Commercial use

We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website.  We also don’t allow Knol pages that have the primary purpose of profiting from displaying ads from any publisher network, such as pages created with little or no unique content that exist only to display ads. 

Why of interest to travel websites?

One resource that travel companies tend to have in abundance is content - for example guides to specific destinations or travel tips. Now Google has given you a nice place to put it…… and, probably, in a few months time, Google will start to put Knol results in the main search results - so your content will end up being promoted.

Who should be publishing via Knol?

• Destination marketing organisations - promote your destination or area by publishing a destination guide
• Hoteliers - create a page describing your hotel
• Activity organisers - for example if you sell diving holidays - re-purpose your existing diving articles - I am sure you have some…..

Frankly no one has a clue what Google will do with Knol - but just put up some content and see what happens. What will be interesting will be when multiple authors have written about the same topic - how will Google determine whether one article about a specific hotel is any better than another one…..

All Google need to do now is let users put youtube videos into a Knol article….. and, collectively, we could build the Google travel content portal that has been in the pipeline for the last few months!

There is a very good blog post describing how Knol works on Google Blogoscoped.

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