Mar
17

Link Building With Yahoo! Answers: A Waste Of Time?

Filed Under Link building, Web 2.0 

Are your link building efforts with Yahoo! Answers a great traffic source, or a waste of time? I field questions all the time about the “best” traffic building methods, as well as specific questions on techniques and traffic sources. One of those sources that’s often asked about is Yahoo! Answers.

I’ve posted about this in various places, so I thought I’d reiterate my thoughts here. I’ve determined that, for the most part, Yahoo! Answers is a waste of time.

Here are my reasons:

  • You have no control over the keywords on the page, so it can’t be optimized in your favor.
  • The pages rank in search engines primarily for long tail keywords. This makes sense, given the lack of optimization.
  • Yahoo! has a nasty habit of banning you for no apparent reason, requiring you to create new accounts all the time.
  • You can’t put your link in every post or you’ll be banned.
  • Your links are nofollow, so your SEO benefits are minimized.
  • Many of the answers are very low grade, contributing to a lower value user experience.

All in all, from a marketing standpoint, there are far better ways to spend your time.

Let me qualify that a bit by adding the following:

I’m speaking primarily about the usefulness of Yahoo! Answers as a long term link building strategy, not as a short term traffic boost. Virtually everyone I’ve heard report on their success with Yahoo! answers tells about great short term traffic. But what happens when you stop answering questions on a regular basis? Typically, traffic drops off dramatically.

Compare that to article marketing, where your links grow automatically over time, and your search engine rankings improve with no additional effort on your part. Write an article once and submit it, and it will continue to work for you for months and years to come. Create a page on your site that has compelling content, and people will link to it. These link building activities have far better long term business building value than answering questions at Yahoo! Answers.

Agree? Disagree? What am I missing?

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Comments

2 Responses to “Link Building With Yahoo! Answers: A Waste Of Time?”

  1. Eric Melin on May 2nd, 2009 10:11 am

    hi,

    Very nice to visit your blog and found very interesting. I also have an site http://www.checktheirtraffic.com, which is a free website application that allows users to easily check the traffic volumes of competing websites.I Want that You will give me a link on your blog and I will do the same for you.

    Thank you

    Eric Melin

  2. Martin - Security. on September 20th, 2009 10:48 am

    Yahoo! Answers?

    I’d love to have the time (and the knowledge) to participate there. You give some very good reasons though why it may not be worth the time as far as link building goes.

    Your advice about creating content ‘good enough to link to’ fits in nicely because some of those links are likely to be from . . . Yahoo! Answers :0)

    Great advice here, I’m going to keep reading.

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