Yahoo Answers is good for driving targetted traffic to your website. If people see that you’re an expert in your field, they will usually click on the link to your website for more information (provided you’ve included a link in your report). However, you need to be at least a Level 2 account holder to be able to insert clickable links, otherwise the links will be plain text and people will have to copy and paste the url in their browser and the chances of that happening are very slim.
So i decided to become Level 2 in yahoo answers and i had to accumulate 250 points. You get 100 points by signing up to yahoo answers, 1 point for logging in everyday and 2 point for each answer provided. Asking questions cost you 10 points and receiving violation incurs you points as well. If you’re voted the best answer, you get 10 points for that but i didn’t really focus on that one and concentrated my efforts on answering questions as 75 answers will get me to Level 2. Since you are only allowed to provide 20 answers a day for Level 1 accounts, it took me 3 days to reach Level 2 because I answered my daily limits and a couple of my answers were chosen as best answers.
All the links that i provided when i was Level 1 became active and clickable and so were any subsequent links. I wanted to see how long it was going to take me to answer 20 questions. So i decided to do a little promotion for this guy for his SEO website. All my answers were really great and helpful and it took me 1 and half hours to complete the task. That was not worth my time at all but i got a surprise email the next day informing me that my yahoo answer account was suspended. I quickly appealed against it because i held this yahoo account since the year 2000 and wanted to keep it clean but the response i got was that i violated the rules and it’s been banned now. I emailed them lot once more asking them to check the quality of my answers and not go by the links i provided (well i know i got suspended for including too many links) but they never replied back.
I later found out that you need to keep all your questions and answers on yahoo private because other users will try to get you banned. Like i said, i wasn’t just inserting links but was providing helpful answers but once your yahoo answers is suspended, there is no way to get it back. The second thing i learned was that you need to keep a balance on how many answers you will include links and how many answers you won’t. Put it this way, if you include a link in all your answers, it doesn’t look good and will get you banned sooner or later. Best thing to do is keep a low profile and promote your website by putting the URL in the source section when you answer a question occasionally.
I’m a bit upset about this specific yahoo answer account being banned but i’ve got someone to open 5 new accounts for me now and they are all promoting my sites and because the answers and questions are private (so nobody can view the activity on these accounts), they are all doing fine. If you haven’t tried uahoo answers as a method of traffic, it’s not late to start now and this could be one of the finest SEO strategies that you can employ.