Getting Traffic From Yahoo Answers

Yahoo has one of the oldest and most active community sites on the internet. You can say that they "invented" social websites with Yahoo Answers. If you haven't heard of it then where the hell have you been?

Yahoo Answers is HIGHLY respected in SEO land and the PR9 comes with a lot of link juice even though the links are NOFOLLOW. Before I go any further I don't want you to get hung up with building links from Yahoo Answers. One or two a week is plenty. You just want to get yourself "in there".

As a traffic source, Yahoo answers can be very powerful and some marketers use it as a primary source of traffic. There is a bit of a trick to it because readers can report you if they feel you are abusing the system. Most of the time your competitors will report you which can cause your account to be frozen and all your links stripped.

So, you want to make sure you build your Yahoo links the right way. If you want to use it for generating traffic you have to be a real expert on the subject otherwise you will waste your time. I just use it to get links. It's really quick and very easy. Here's how to do it the right way:

1. Create an account and answer 10 to 20 questions WITHOUT posting any links in the resources box. You will earn point for every answer you post. Some questions are just plain stupid like “do you think I am fat?” - you can answer 20 or 30 of those in 20 minutes. Be warned, some of the questions might leave you doubting the survival of the human race :).
2. After you've accumulated some points, browse the categories to your niche and look for questions that you can answer WELL. In most categories answers come in like every minute and when you hit refresh you will see 5 or 6 new questions. Important: when you answer a question you can leave a URL(s) in the resources box.

   ALWAYS leave more than one. I usually pick 2 from authority sites like Wikipedia and Answers.com or Webmd and then I sandwich a link to my site in the middle. That way a moderator can't accuse you of just linking to your site.

3. The link to your site MUST be relevant to your answer. Don't just link to your homepage. Do deep links to pages that has good answers to the question. This will ensure that you never get kicked out.
4. Over time you will build up quite a few links in Yahoo Answers. The danger is always that your competitors will report you and try to knock you off (sad, but true). Make sure that you have more than one account. If you follow the steps above you will be quite safe, but you never know. Having multiple accounts is just a good safety net to protect your links.