SEOly Blog » Yahoo

Jump Start With Yahoo Answers

Stephen Quallich — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:42:46 +0000

Yahoo Answers is a surprisingly useful resource to give a new or existing website a shot of adrenaline. The community is full of legitimate people, who actually answer questions, and spammers, who are abusing it for traffic and backlinks. Yahoo does a decent job suspending (aka banning) the accounts of these spammers, but it really is a futile effort as the spammers can just make new accounts. Another method of deterring spamming is that links on Yahoo Answers appear clickable only if the user posting is level 2 or above. On the plus side, this banning keeps Yahoo Answers from becoming a complete cesspool. You can choose to be a full out spammer, borderline spammer, or a more genuine user. All will have their respective pros and cons.

Full Out Spammer:

Write one or a couple (if you are felling particularly ambitious) answers including your link(s). Copy and paste this answer to as many relevant questions as possible. If you post this answer to unrelated topics, you will greatly increase you’ve chance of being suspended. Try to achieve level 2 prior to getting suspended, so that the links you leave behind are clickable. You can do this by voting for questions to gain points (prior to your massive spamming), posting questions on another account and choosing your own answer as the best answer, or by being more conservative regarding what questions you answer. Have multiple accounts, so suspensions don’t halt you spamming.

Borderline Spammer:

The same concept as being a full out spammer, except you are much more selective with the questions that you pick to answer. You only answer questions that your prewritten answers match quite well with. The likelihood of getting banned is slim, but you might as well have multiple accounts just in case.

Genuine User:

You write a custom answer to each question and include your link when appropriate. One might even include the links of other websites to give an answer more depth and validity is necessary. The likelihood of getting banned is extremely slim, but it still does happen; luckily, you can appeal all suspensions.

Whichever method you choose to (ab)use, remember that you are creating and defining a reputation for the website that you link to. I view Yahoo Answers mainly as a traffic promotion source rather than as a means of improving serps. Granted the links are nofollow, they still provide some benefit when it comes to search engine optimization.

Above is a graph of what Yahoo Answers did for a website of mine; the posting method used would fit into the borderline spammer category. I started to post ~250 answers over the period of 2 weeks starting on November 13th. After posting was stopped on November 27th, traffic from Yahoo Answers asymptotes down to ~50 visitors per day. As January continues though, you can see that traffic rebounds to ~150 visitors per day. I am not quite sure what caused this slight rebound, but I believe that the questions started to rank for long tail search terms.

In terms of revenue generated regarding time spent, Yahoo Answers has done quite well so far. The niche promoted earns $10 CPM, which means that approximately $150 was generated from Yahoo Answers traffic thus far. Estimated time to post an answer is 1 minute, which means that this earned $36 / hour. Not too shabby considering the fact that minimum wage is only $7.25 / hour. This may just be mindless copying and pasting, but aren’t all minimum wage jobs exactly that?

Check and Track Keyword Rank in Search Engines

Stephen Quallich — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 02:38:20 +0000

This Firefox add-on, Rank Checker, is a very useful tool for quickly find out how your website ranks for a specific keyword on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It is quite easy to use, and once set up it can be used to track your keywords’ rank over a period of time. Its auto update feature allows users to set it, so that it can retrieve the rank of your specified list of keywords every X days. These ranks of your keywords can then be exported into a .csv and stored for reference or be used to track your progress up or down your keyword ranks. I have heard of many webmaster who manually check their ranks in search engines regarding their keywords. This is an extremely tedious task and can be completely eliminated with the use of this add-on. There are an array of additional features that this add-on has to offer, but the core of it is quite a unique tool. If you want to easily track or check your keyword ranks in search engines, then this Firefox add-on is something that you should not be without as a webmaster.

Search Engine Market Share

Stephen Quallich — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:57:41 +0000

The market share of the larger search engines are as follows: Google – 60%, Yahoo – 18%, MSN – 12%, AOL – 4%, and Ask – 2%. Google clearly has the largest presence with regards to search engines, while Yahoo has a decent portion of the business, and MSN has a small but still noticeable presence. Even though Google has 60% of the market, that is still only 10% more than half of the market share of search engines. This means that as webmasters, we can not simply focus our attention on Google regarding search engine optimization. If a webmaster solely optimizes their web site for Google, they are in reality missing out on a potential 40% of searches. Recently, I have seen may webmasters concentrating all of their effort on their ranking with Google and completely neglecting the other search engines. If a webmaster is creating quality content, positive link building, etc. then your rankings in all of the search engines should be fairly constant. Instead of optimizing your site for a certain search engine, focus on all of them and your website will gain exposure and grow even more in a universal manner.

Yahoo Rejects Microsoft’s Offer

Stephen Quallich — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 09:05:32 +0000

Yahoo Inc. is set to reject Microsoft’s $44.6 billion dollar offer ($31 per share) because they believe that this bid was an under value of the companies true net worth. Yahoo thinks that Microsoft is trying to take advantage of them, while they are weak, and steal the company for a low price. It is still possible for Microsoft to obtain Yahoo through other means. Microsoft can always return to Yahoo with another bid for the company; analysts have estimated that Microsoft may pay as much as $35 per share. However, sources say that Yahoo is unlikely to accept any offers under $40 per share. Additionally, Microsoft could take this deal straight to the stockholders. Things are sure to change in the upcoming days, but the question we are all wondering about is: what will Microsoft’s response be to Yahoo’s decline?

Yahoo + MSN (Microsoft) vs. Google?

Stephen Quallich — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 22:05:50 +0000

If Microsoft’s purchase of Yahoo does go through, which seems to be a likely possibility at the time being, how will the search engine industry change? I believe that the MSN and Yahoo’s combination will have a greater chance to steal market share from Google. A sharing of technology after the potential merger could mean better algorithms, which would result in overall better results to compete with Google. However, at the heart of this issue lies Google’s strong hold on the search engine market. Google’s name is known everywhere and their reputation is well respected. I feel that Google’s search engine simply produces better results in the majority of situation due to better algorithms, which simply out power their competition: Yahoo, MSN, etc. If the Microsoft’s merger with Yahoo does happen, will these two David’s be able to encroach further into the search engine industry that Goliath Google has under control? The merger opens the possibility for growth, but in the end I think that Google will still dominate the search engine industry unless they really drop the ball many, many times.