I stumbled across this Google feature today – and I haven’t seen much (anything actually) written about it.

Called Kickstart, it’s a set of landing pages hosted by Google dedicated to a specific theme. Here’s an example:

http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/landing/kickstartyoursearch/

The topic pages feature a topic “host” and offer a list of links that run specific related queries on Google.

I have no idea how much traffic these pages attract and I haven’t seen any referrals from it on any sites I’m involved with. However, obviously they would generate some traffic and probably the best way to benefit from it is to suggest a theme in the hope of being selected as a “host” – which of course would be related to your business or site. If you take a look at some of the pages, below the photo of the “host” is a link to their web site.

It would also be interesting to see if these pages pass on PageRank – the link to the host’s site doesn’t have the nofollow tag/attribute and there’s no robots exclusion metatag in the code :). However, the exclusion may be listed in a robots.txt file.

Anyhow You can suggest a theme/topic for a Kickstart page via kickstart@google.com

The way I came across Kickstart was via banner ad run by Google through the Doubleclick network – can’t remember which site. Google completed its acquisition of the Doubleclick ad network back in March 2008.