Google Knol

Figured I would take a look at how Knol was doing these days.
Looks like about 2,012 visits from 102 countries over the last 3 months. Unfortunately I only added a counter just about 3 months a go. However Knol indicates about 20,922 page views so far, after about a year and a half. The important metric to me is the number of people that get sent over to interfacebus; only 738 people this year.

The knol with the largest pageviews relates to computer buses [IEEE1284 to name just one]. The second highest visited page covers the RS232 bus, while the third page covers the SD Card. The most recent page under development covers Temperature Derating.

Any of the Knols can be reached from this page; Computer Buses. Which by the way showed up one listing above a link from interfacebus.com.
Graphic' Knol page-views for the last thirty days.

Office Live and their Free Web Services

I finally logged back into my officelive account after 7 months of not checking it. I stopped logging in after Microsoft disallowed any other browser but MS Explorer from accessing the account. Of course I hadn't had any updates either, but I would have like to see the site stats regardless.

Any way Microsoft had said you would get a free web site, free hosting, and a free domain name. Now they indicate a policy change and they will no longer pay for the domain name; the interfacebus.net domain name expires April of next year.

The question is do I want this site, or is the site even making any money for interfacebus.com?
The web site really only has about a dozen pages


What I don't like about Officelive:
I can't run Google ads.
I can't login with out using MS Explorer.
The web tools aren't that great.

What I like about the web site:
It locks down the interfacebus.net domain name.
The site has a Page-Rank of 3
The site has sent 944 visitors to interfacebus.com [over 3 years]
---- Serialphy.com has only referred 247 in the last year.
---- google-pages [defunct] referred 2,597 visits over the last 3 years.
---- google sites has sent in 499 in just the last three months.
---- google knols has sent in 783 visitors in just a year and a half.
The site has been online for 3 years [06/06] and has history.
---- The incoming referred visitors view more pages and stay on the site longer
The site allows interfacebus to show up twice on a google search [cause it's a different site]

What is it just $10 a year anyway for a domain name, did I make that from those 900 visitors? It is free advertising [or was], but people posting about my web site in on-line forums sent in 37,127 visitors over the last 3 years! now that's free advertising......

The last related posting regarding interfacebus.net was 4/08 Usage Stats.

Knol is just not working for me

Well maybe Knol is working or maybe it's not. I have about 10 different Knols published of varying lengths, with different generation dates. Some Knols have been out there for months while others were just published, so some have more page views than others for that reason.

The ten Knols out there have been viewed 11,460 times over the last year. Now that number is not so bad for ten random pages on the internet, but there's a bigger issue. Those 11,000 page views have only sent 595 visitors to interfacebus.com, the site that really counts [link is not the main page].

Those incoming visitors have a 67% bounce rate, or 67% of the incoming people only check one page before leaving the site. So for every 19 Knol page views I get one page view at interfacebus.com ~ that doesn't sound that bad, put like that. But only 30% of those new people coming in were interested in the site. err only 178 people had any interest in the main site; now that sounds low.....

I consider the Knols just another web site:
1. Another external site that points to interfacebus
2. Another way to show up in the Search Engine Results [SERP]
----- two unrelated sites may show up on the same page result.
3. The Knols point to a number of my pages, other than the home page
4. The Knols push Page Rank to the pages being pointed to.
5. Another way for new people to find my site.

The dots [points] on the attached graphic are per week for the data range indicated. The data is from Google Analytics, for Referral sources, filtered to show only incoming hits from knol.google.com.

I don't track the amount of time spent working a page, so I can't say if it was worth the effort to work with Knol. However it takes months to get a page going after the Search Engine delays are accounted for.

FYI; the best Knol relates to a general description of Computer Buses, with 3,442 page views and a page rank of 3.

What ever; most of the Knols are to short, so I need to keep spending more time working them. Maybe someday I'll get some visitors from the Knol pages.......

[Text Removed 6-28-2010]

Google Knol Awards

Seems two of the Knols I wrote have won some awards. The two Knols both won a top viewed award, and a Top Pick Knol award. I assume somebody at Google made the notation for the "award", because they don't indicate any thing other than a small medal. Or this could just be like a smiley face kind of award. If it makes the knols show up sooner in a Knol search, that would be good.

I really would like to have the knols bring in more traffic to my web site. I think I posted the first Knol back in August 2008, now I have nine Knols. The two Knols that have the traffic banner have seen thousands of page views, but have only resulted in a few hundred visits to interfacebus.com.

Incoming traffic from Google Knol is sitting at 0.03% tracked over the last several months. But the search engine brings in the most when tracking hits due to Google.

Of course writing a web page and hoping for page views or traffic is more luck than another thing else. I added a few pages on FET derating over the last month, but they are only generating a few page views a day. In fact the page views are so low for that section they could just be from me checking the page.

Page hits and visits are up for January over December and may end up higher than either October and November.

Google's Knol interface

I signed up for Knol from Google today. I had heard about it a few months ago, but at that time it was closed to most users. Knol is open to the general population now, and I signed up for it.

I assume Knol is Google's answer to Wikipedia, which is good but some what odd. Many search terms on Google return a listing from Wiki as the first listing on the results page. So why not come up with their own free social content collaboration 'encyclopedia' web portal. Of course the Wikipedia site gets a lot of bad press, so it could be that by next year the Knol site will see the same press, but it may depend on how they post those pages on their results page.

Any way I posted two articles today. Both need some help, but I posted them to get them out there. There should not be many people finding the pages at these stage, so it should not be a worry.

I posted one Knol on the Secure Digital card [flash memory] and one Knol on the declining RS-232 interface [re-posted from this blog]. However, neither posting shows up in a search yet? I did just see a link to verify my name, so I went ahead and did that, I got a call 10 seconds after hitting the submit button.

The attach picture depicts web visits to interfacebus from the Nerthlands so far this year.