Yahoo Answers: No Links for New Folks
By Matt McGee on Jul 1, 2009 in Social Media, Yahoo
If you’re a small business owner that’s following my advice (or anyone’s) about marketing on Yahoo Answers, things just got a little more difficult today.
Yahoo says that Level 1 users will no longer be able to include active links in their answers. You can still include a URL, but it won’t appear as an active link. As the Yahoo blog post says, this is a “small but significant” change.
What’s it mean? If you’re playing by the rules and providing helpful answers to the community, not spamming, just keep doing what you’ve been doing. It just means that, if you’re still a Level 1 user, you’ll have to work a little longer and keep adding value to the community before your links will become active/clickable. (They’ll still be no-followed, just as they have for a long time now.)
- Part One: What Is Yahoo! Answers?
This is part one in a series on social marketing using Yahoo! Answers. You may want to start reading with... - A Guide to Social Marketing on Yahoo! Answers
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10 Comment(s)
By Justin M. on Jul 1, 2009 | Reply
Interesting! I think this is actually very positive news if you are a small business owner. Because once you become a LVL 2 user,(which isn’t all that hard, really) I can see this improving click-through-rates to your URL/website and being a great signal of trust and authority when your URLs are hyperlinked/active and others’ are not.
Get those Best Answers and get to Level 2, I think it will really pay off!
By Tyler on Jul 2, 2009 | Reply
Excellent news actually. The spam in Yahoo Answers is outta control. This is a positive measure that will actually help businesses. It’ll only take a little more time but the number of worthless commercial answers people post that get in the way of the good ones shouldn’t be so obstructive anymore.
By Matt McGee on Jul 2, 2009 | Reply
I agree that this is good news. I was just reporting a bunch of spam/junk on YA last night, and noticed that I now have super powers — things are deleted as soon as I report them. Nice.
By Joel McLaughlin on Jul 6, 2009 | Reply
I actually tried to get links from yahoo answers recently when it was shut down from new links. A competitors website was getting some link juice and I got a little jealous
By Nick Stamoulis on Jul 7, 2009 | Reply
I think this is a good thing. Yahoo answers can work very well without having to put links. If you use a nice image and have your profile filled out completely you shouldn’t have any problems driving traffic to where you need to.
By Agra on Jul 12, 2009 | Reply
Yes, I agree with this change.
It will help them to fight against spam, I have seen many useless answers posted just for the traffic to their own web sites. These people are not participating in the community and they are also not helping others in any way, in fact they are confusing.
I hope this change will yield some positive results.
By David Carp on Jul 12, 2009 | Reply
What is going on with Yahoo answers its down again ????
I had a great idea that only the best chosen answer will get the link highlighted . That would stop spam.
By Jared Bing on Jul 12, 2009 | Reply
It’s still fairly easy to get to level 2. Click on the answer tab and find unresolved questions that require an opinion or an obvious answer. You can reply to 20 questions a day and it took me 2 full days and 3 questions on third day before getting to level 2.
By Kelley on Aug 2, 2009 | Reply
This still doesn’t work. As long as there isn’t a “www.” at the beginning, it will post. Look at the example here… http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylv=3?qid=20090802120213AAEfO5T
By Robert Pattinson on Aug 31, 2009 | Reply
I agree that this change is positive. Hopefully, this will weed out the spammers that are only looking for a free link.
I am still a bit unclear on if we will need to put a link in our answers or if we can setup a signature file. There was one comment about having your website listed in your profile. Will that option only show up once you are granted level 2 access?