Yahoo Answers took away majority of traffic

yahoo answers a threat to content publishers?

[sandyk20]

Since last few months we had been observing this.. hopefully others can clarify more. We used to get decent results from yahoo search engine to some topics on our site but lately yahoo answers is ranking on top results for same phrases and keywords today.

No way to get on top ahead of yahoo answers now for those phrases

[Jon_King]

Many of those Yahoo Answers are worthless. They certainly have not figured out which ones offer good information and therefore could rank high.

They have not been a threat to me because of their poor quality.

[sandyk20]

this going on a large scale now.. I am sure when webmasters talk about discussing only on a niche market for better productivity of a site how can sites like yahoo answers gain importance when they cover each and every topic, is it just due to good backlinks ?

[SteveWh]

Yahoo! Answers can also help, though. If your articles get cited as sources in other people's answers, it can bring traffic.

Also, there is no prohibition against answering questions yourself and mentioning your own article as long as the reference is specifically relevant to the answer. (There is a prohibition against posting irrelevant links.)

It's a lot of work to promote your articles this way, but there are people doing it. I answer a few questions once in a while and find it fun.

I thought Answers looked sort of pointless at first since virtually any question can be answered with a web search, but many of the askers, I think, are kids or others with not a lot of internet experience. Its apparent popularity inspired an interesting discovery for me: different people like to get their information in different ways. Some prefer web searches; some prefer forums; some prefer a place like Answers, extremely informal. Different formats for different preferences.

[andrewsclothing]

I always browse yahoo answers questions to see if I can lead traffic to any of my sites. Adds a link and I am sure it is one yahoo ranks highly since they host it

[sandyk20]

the bad part of yahoo is they publish same information on multiple sub-domains
[webmasterworld.com...]

and one of this published information ranks all other sites

[robzilla]

What do you mean there's no way to rank above Yahoo! Answers for those terms? Have you tried working on improving your pages where possible and building links? If one of their Answers pages outranks you, it's probably not for a very competitive term. It happens in Google, too. There's no point in complaining about it, it's just another website you have to compete with.

Yahoo! Answers is certainly a strong presence, with a lot of user-generated content and strong interlinking of their answer pages, but I wouldn't consider it a "threat to content publishers," at least not more so than any other content site, when it comes to search engine rankings.