Using Answers as a Sales Tool?

[Brett_Tabke]

I was reading some "answers" at Google and one of the questions peaked my interest. It was a question with only one obvious answer. The answer referred the asker to a particular website. I'd bet money it was the original guys website.

So, for a couple of bucks he got his url put out there for the world to see. It's an interesting promotion tactic.

[vitaplease]

Never thought of that one..

I guess the answer crew are/have to be very careful at citing their own sites, but just putting the question to which there is only one answer/url (your own) is a neat promotion trick. Nice one.

[eyeinthesky]

But wouldn't this be a dirty trick? Think it will give Google a bad name too...

[mil2k]

Have heard this one before..

[Giacomo]

Q: Will Google crawl those links?

http://answers.google.com/robots.txt [answers.google.com]

User-Agent: * 
Disallow: /answers/main?cmd=search&q=

[Brett_Tabke]

Yep, and that is a very valuable demographic.

>dirty trick.

Why? If done right, 99.9% of the people reading it, won't even recognize it as promotion and will be thankful for the information.

[zgb999]

I checked the backlinks of some URLs linked from the answers but at least Google doesn't seem to count those links.

[rfgdxm1]

>I was reading some "answers" at Google and one of the questions peaked my interest. It was a question with only one obvious answer. The answer referred the asker to a particular website. I'd bet money it was the original guys website.

I actually know of a real world case where someone did this. He was a news admin of a large Usenet service. He paid Google Answers to answer the question "Why is <name of his Usenet service> better than all their competition?" He asked a loaded question, and of course got a reply saying how great his service was. He actually posted his question, and the answer, to Usenet for humorous reasons. Of course, he could have hid the fact it was he who asked.

[dotremy]

"Never thought of that one..
I guess the answer crew are/have to be very careful at citing their own sites, but just putting the question to which there is only one answer/url (your own) is a neat promotion trick. Nice one. "

I think Brett ment the guy *asking* the question got his own site back as a answer.

I was almost tempted to do the same thing.
But I didn't :)

<edit>typo