Not much publicity or hype has been on the new Google Knol [A unit of knowledge]. But it looks like Google prefers ranking its Knol articles in SERP better than other websites.
This favoritism has been noted by a number of publishers. Even an article originally posted in a different website with good PR many months back, if when copied and posted in Knol can give higher results than the original article. This has caused a number of concerns as Google who played the Pope all these days is now trying to promote its own website. This is not a fair game by Google which would just result in loss of reputation.
When a duplicate article is posted on Knol, Google warns that it is a duplicate content as it identifies from where the content was extracted. However, when the same duplicate content is posted, it ranks even better than the original content. Google might claim that this is based on the “Query Deserves Freshness” algorithm which it has been promoting during the recent days. But that doesn’t mean that “new duplicate content deserves more” or “we will add PR to our sites the way we want” Google algorithms are valid.
With Google falsely promoting its own new site, SEO experts have identified the potential in linking to these pages and a large number of search engine experts have already started adding articles or linking their websites to Google Knol.