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Day 29 – Part III – Yahoo Answers
By Mike Mindel | August 30, 2007
This content is summarized from Day 29 Training – Yahoo Answers for the Thirty Day Challenge, presented by Rob Somerville.
Yahoo Answers
Help someone with their question and get a backlink in the process.
Yahoo Answers is a site where people can ask questions about anything and get answers from anyone with a Yahoo account. The reason why Yahoo Answers is a good place to come and spend some time is because Yahoo Answers gets good traction in the search engines, especially with long tail keywords. So I do recommend it as a place to come and add some value and get a niche relevant backlink to your content site.
If you don’t have an account the first thing you need to is sign-in and get a yahoo id. Once you’ve done that you can log in and you’re then presented with the above interface.
We’re going to be answering questions. So go straight to the search for questions
What you might want to do before clicking on search is click on the advanced tab
and select ‘Open Questions’
If you select ‘All’, the first questions which come up will be resolved questions. The way Yahoo Answers works is that if somebody raises a question and many other people provide answers, the person who asked the question has the opportunity to display the best answer. This will be displayed against the question ongoing. Once the question has been resolved the only way to interface with that question is to provide a comment to that answer. Which is not as powerful as providing the selected answer in the first place.
So I suggest you select ‘Open Questions’ which will show questions that haven’t been resolved yet.
Click on search and Yahoo Answers delivers all the open questions related to ’speed reading’. Let’s pick a question we think we can answer
You can see this particular question is accepting answers
Click on ‘Answer this Question’
and enter your answer
Make sure you place the keyword that you are optimizing for in the answer as best as you can and put your url in the source
You can also put your url in the ‘Your Answer’ section itself using an a href tag. However I’ve had inconsistent results. Sometimes, depending on where the link is, Yahoo Answer hasn’t accepted my answer. I’ve had much more success putting my url in the source and my keyword in the answer.
There’s now a good chance if Google spiders this question and your answer is keyword specific that you should get listed for the keyword you are trying to get optimized for.
You don’t know whether your answer will be accepted as the final answer. But it’s worth submitting answers to all of the questions that you feel you can reasonably add value to. You can also go through all of the resolved questions as well and add a comment with a link to your website. This isn’t quite as strong as having your answer accepted as the best answer but it’s still worth doing.
The nice thing is that these questions are highly niche specific questions so you get to target your answer to the keyword you are trying to build a backlink for.
It’s worth spending an hour now and again trawling through Yahoo Answers. Hopefully Google will spider those answers and give you credit for a backlink back to your website.
Closing Comments
- Long term your goal is to build the best possible backlink profile pointing at your website. If you have the best link platform you will be considered the best authority on your keyword likely get high rankings for that keyword.
- It’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the things you can do to build links. Overwhelm leads to inaction and inaction doesn’t lead to your goal. Gradually over time I would build expertise with these strategies and make sure you take action and implement.
- Build links over a period of time. Over time do a search in Yahoo for your website and make sure you can see the effect of your link building as Yahoo finds your links.
- Find the strategies that work for you and you feel comfortable doing. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Your link network is like a house being built on a foundation. Your keyword research and hosting platform and content are the foundation. The link network is the house. It takes time to build the house well. It’s worth spending quality time on this over a period of time. You’re prepared to do that if you’re being rewarded by the thing you desire. Which is ultimately ranking and ultimately traffic.
- You don’t want traffic just for anything. You don’t want clicks if they are not going to be valuable to you. As internet marketers we want the traffic to convert to sales. Be aware of the conversion you are achieving with the traffic and then spend time not just on building links but also on conversion strategies and that lead to greater visitor value both for you and people clicking through to your website.
-Rob
Technorati Tags: day 29 training, thirty day challenge, rob somerville, yahoo answers, backlink, open questions, speed reading, accepting answers, your answers, know your source, google spider, build best possible backlink profile
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Topics: Daily Summaries | 3 Comments »
August 30th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
The Yahoo answers strategy is not one that folks would first think of to build links.
It would build credibility by using your own knowledge and experience.
Again I really appreciate the notes, Mike.
As a comment, it may be me and my computer, but I getan error page when I try to use the links inthe summary page.
For Clean Water Everywhere,
Richard (alias Bluerunner)
November 5th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
You will NOT get backlinks from yahoo answers as they use rel=”nofollow” on all outgoing links.
This may have worked a long time ago but not any more
July 17th, 2008 at 7:09 am
Nice little guide, thanks. Always thought of Yahoo Answers as a forum, but its pretty different. Although the backlinks you get are nofollow, you can surely add tremendous value to your website by helping people there.