Ginger or Mary Ann? Yahoo! Answers
For those who don’t know, Yahoo! Answers is (quoting its official blog) “a place where people ask questions on any topic and get answers by sharing facts, opinions and personal experiences.”
He hadn’t paid much attention to Yahoo! Answers until Danny Sullivan spoke about it recently at the May SES Conference in Seattle. Danny wrote an excellent overview of Yahoo’s “social media” vehicle, but my focus in this article will be somewhat different.
There is a lot of inaccurate information online about search engine optimization. SEO is a very challenging / ever-changing topic for a newbie to understand. The neophyte often does not realize that much of the SEO information on the Internet is incorrect, out of date or biased. Although online resources such as forums offer accurate SEO information (if you search hard enough or if a trusted member answers your question), most are very intimidating for people looking for the basic knowledge that the regulars already possess. .
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could request basic (and more advanced) SEO information and respond accurately in an open, stress-free online environment? Maybe Yahoo! Answers is such a place.
So, I joined the party and started asking some basic SEO questions:
Will I get better search engine rankings by manually submitting my website or using submission software?
What’s the best way for my new poker website to get to the top of Google?
These are the typical beginner questions that I asked in the hope that an SEO expert would clarify for me by offering the following correct answers:
- You don’t need to submit websites to search engines, and even if you did, submitting has no effect on the rankings you may receive.
- Furgetaboutit.
Unfortunately, no one on Yahoo! The Answers community responded like this. I came to the conclusion that beginner SEO questions, asked by myself or other respondents, attracted responses that tended to perpetuate the already high level of SEO misinformation. People who leave these responses also tend to put a lot of self-service links on their posts.
I got much better answers by asking more advanced questions:
What was the effect of Google’s “Florida” update on SEO methodology?
I immediately got a relevant answer on the topic with an authoritative link on the topic.
What is latent semantic analysis and how relevant is it to search engine optimization?
A very challenging question and although no one answered it directly, at least I was directed to the Wikipedia page on the subject.
For fun, I asked a few non-SEO questions and learned quite a bit from doing so.
Ginger or Mary Ann?
At SES Seattle, Danny mentioned that Yahoo! The answers would be integrated into Yahoo SERPS. But how much strength would they be given?
Someone else who asked the same question as me landed in the Yahoo Top 10. It remains to be seen how long the question will stay in such a high ranking. While I don’t expect Yahoo! The answers result in such a high ranking for an ultra-competitive ecommerce term, if you are targeting some specific ‘long tail’ keywords I think it would be a worthwhile exercise to answer the questions relevant to them. In your response, you would use your terms repeatedly in a manner consistent with good writing style.
In short, SEOs will need to understand how to optimally work with Yahoo! Answers as part of your overall search engine strategy. As more SEOs start to get involved in the process, hopefully they will contribute to improving the quality of responses currently being given to people asking SEO questions.