Google Sites, Google’s update for Jotspot, the Wiki application it bought almost a year and a half ago has just been released. Now, just a question from a casual observer, but given how Squidoo has been embraced by SEO-types for its ability for anyone to generate content easily, for it to be indexed quickly, and for its links out to be relatively unchanged, one wonders what kind of implications Google Sites will have as well.

Granted, Google Sites looks like its under the “Google Apps” umbrella, which means that you probably have to own a domain first (to give the appearance, at least, of having a “business” that the app can go under), but on the surface there does seem to be some similarities here, not the very least, including the fact that it doesn’t outwardly support ads (nevermind Adsense). That is, its not natively offered as an option. Links as well, are not direct links, but get parsed through the Google url.

For example, links get changed into –> http://www.google.com/?url=XXXXX

Where “XXXXX” is the URL you are pointing to.

Anyway, I’m sure much more will be written about Google Sites in the coming future, but as it stands, it seems like Google’s intention is certainly to keep it SEO neutral (neutered?) for the time being.

Interesting: When Google bought Jotspot initially, there was already some thoughts about what kind of SEO implications this might have, this being one of them.