After the launch of Google Knol, Aaron Wall of SEO Book.com takes a scalpel to the service and observes that Google might be favouring content produced in-house. First he points to an experiment of Danny Sullivan (of search engine land), and concludes that, "[...] from the above data and the aggressive promotion of YouTube content after the roll out of universal search it is fair to state that house content is favored by the Google algorithm."

Aaron then proceeded to create an SEO Knol which uses the same content he has used on Work.com and also syndicated to Business.com. While querying specific content, he found that Google ranks his Knol content higher than the same content on Business.com (which should ideally PageRank higher, being a noted authority). This leads him to the conclusion that one could very well copy other's content, put it on a Google Knol, and rank higher than the original content: "Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm", he says, "Google knows the content is duplicate (as proven by the notification they put on their page), and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source."

He concludes the post by saying that "Google doesn't like cheating, unless it favors their business objectives".

If this in-house favouring is true, and a future trend instead of teething problems for a new service, then it is a can of worms that Google has opened. Original content should rank higher, especially if said content is on a page with a higher PageRank and thus -- authority. This is the essence of what makes Google Search objective and reliable. If Google decides to bypass its own policy, for its own products, it can't be good for the greater web.

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image courtesy of KNOL-KNOL.com