As this site predicted back in 2007, Knol – Google’s dofollow answer to Wikipedia, and a great resource for SEOs looking to juice backlinks – is officially being scrapped. Google announced that Knol will be discontinued April 30, 2012.
True to its announcement, the home page for Knol now sports a closure message.
Transitioning all of your existing Knols to an existing Wordpress.com account is fairly easy, and it will keep all of your backlinks intact. We followed the instructions and the migration was seamless with no link loss (though domain age is an issue).
Part of a general “spring cleaning” of out-dated, ill-fated and poorly conceived products, Knol is joined by Gears, Wave and Friend Connect, to name just a few.
At this time there is no word on why Google, and its partners Solvitor and Crowd Favorite (a web design and WordPress theme developer) choose to utilize WordPress for Annotum, a web-based authoring, publishing platform instead of going with Google-owned Blogger…
But, if this snapshot of Solvitor-founder and CEO’s (Carl Leubsdorf) Google Knol is any indicator, we can probably expect some, ummm, briany stuff from the new endeavor.
If, just for kicks, you’d like to watch the new ensemble’s hits and misses as they develop, please check out Solvitor’s own Annotum in development. It’s great reading.
WordPress is, of course, thrilled to be part of the next stage of Google’s experiment. But again, Why WordPress and not Blogger, Google? Perhaps this does not bode well for Blogger? Or maybe this is Google’s way of acknowledging Blogger’s limitations? This will no doubt fan the flames of the rumors last year that Blogger itself may get the axe.
More great reading here: http://ojasdeliverable.blogspot.com/2011/12/test-knol-number-four.html and here http://groups.google.com/group/annotum?pli=1 and here http://ojas-deliverable-non-annotum.annotum.net/2011/12/test-knol-number-four-gkgrwihhcv7j-4/
Fascinating Annotum, Carl