“To knol or knot to knol, that is the kuestion!” This week Google announced that it is testing a new online knowledge repository called Knol.

The Google Blog presents Knol in this way:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. (…) At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page.

To us it looks like a cross between the Wikipedia and Squidoo or Helium.

Google has realized that web-searchers love the Wikipedia because it presents information in a systematic and easy to read manner. Normally searchers will find the info they are looking for at Wikipedia. They do not have to jump from website to website in order to find all the relevant snippets they need.

A Knol page on a particular topic may serve the same purpose. If the authors know how to write a popular presentation with skill and knowledge, a Knol web page may become the authoritative page on that topic, much in the same way as you see Wikipedia pages at the number 1 position today.

If the Knol pages also includes links to the best relevant resources on the web, Knol may also — eventually — function as a topic directory, maybe replacing the Open Directory.

All of this is good news to Google, as the company may use these pages to serve Google ads.

Some other facts about Knol:

• Google will not serve as an editor of Knol (”All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors”)
• Anyone can write for Knol
• There may be many articles on the same topic
• Readers may vote for knols

The knols will appear in regular Google search results. As Google puts it: “Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.” Other search engines will be allowed to include these pages in their results as well.

Can Knol be used for search engine marketing purposes? Well, it seems anything can be used for search engine marketing purposes, even if Google — as the Wikipedia — decides to put a nofollow tag on all outbound links. (It seems Google will allow regular links) If you establish yourself as the major expert in your field, it will be hard to stop you from including at least one link to one of your own relevant quality sites.

However, the fact that Google — like the Wikipedia — seems to allow edits made by others than the original author, will make it hard to spam the system.

Here is an example of a Knol page as presented by Search Engine Land:

Some will probably argue that Google should stick to search and leave content creation to others. After all, Google failed miserably with its Google Answers service. Still, Yahoo! is very successful as a content provider. Others, like About and Squidoo, have proved that this is an interesting market, and Google cannot take the risk to be left out.

The bad news for all other content providers out there is that it will be increasingly difficult to get a page one result in the search engines. The more webmasters make use if sites like Wikipedia and Knol, the more will link to them and the higher authority they will get. We will soon find that most of the page one positions are taken by services like these.