Building Links by Participating in Q&A Sites
The first content-driven websites were educational. Giants like HowThingsWork, eHow, and Wiki-How once ruled the search pages, drawing in visitors due to their prominent search placements and earning sizable amounts of income through targeted advertising. They offered two-way value; read the pages and you would learn, while advertisers profited from your desire for information.
The second wave of websites were dynamic. Nicknamed Q&A sites, they offered visitors the chance to ask questions directly, with community readers and occasional experts giving their opinion. They remain a major force online today – websites such as Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers continue to attract millions of international visitors daily.
While these websites tend to be of questionable value for information, they’re a fantastic resource for search engine optimizers aiming to boost their website’s ranking and build inbound links. With high PageRank values and a continuous flood of targeted traffic, a link on one of the major answer websites can be highly valuable for both search engine rankings and direct traffic.
Building links, however, isn’t always easy. The major Q&A websites tend to feature moderation on their content pages, making it difficult for SEOs to place valueless links. The answer rests in being the source of quality information – if your outbound link leads to a useful resource, it’s unlikely to be removed or tampered with by moderation staff.
So provide quality, and limit your usage of non-relevant pages or outbound linking. Start by linking to articles and other content-driven pages on your website, each one providing at least some help to those asking questions. If it’s completely impossible to find questions related to your website, it may be worth asking questions yourself and using a secondary account to provide information.
With the right strategy, gaining high-value links from Q&A pages is fairly simple. However, it’s not a form of link building that’s accessible right away. With reasonably strict moderation and tougher-than-usual questions to answer, finding a question page that suits your website can be tricky. Before you drop links left and right, spend some time making sure that you offer value, not just link juice.