I’ve seen many arguments over the effectiveness of Yahoo Answers as a website promotion tool/technique. Some consider it to be a complete waste of time, while others still swear that it is helpful. Today I want to share my take on Yahoo Answers and how it can be used effectively as a marketing tool.

For the most part, those that believe Yahoo Answers to be a waste of time point to the fact that Yahoo adds the “nofollow” attribute to all of the external links in answers. While this is true, it simply means that your websites will not receive a Pagerank boost from the site. It in no way indicates that your site cannot benefit from the links in terms of  traffic or by receiving a boost in the other search engines. Digg  also nofollows links, but very few webmasters will argue that it has no promotional value.

I am a strong believer that Yahoo Answers can provide your website with marketing benefits. It is just important to keep in mind that the primary benefit is going to be highly targeted and trusting traffic. If someone finds an answer to their question on Yahoo Answers and sees a link to your site as a resource, the level of trust that the user has as they visit your site is likely to be higher than it otherwise would be. This is because your link was used by someone else (theoretically, at least) as a quality resource to address the person’s question. Effectively, the resource link serves as a vote of confidence in your site by whoever answered the question.

Depending on the topic of your page and the popularity of the related question, you may receive a few hits from Yahoo Answers each month or several per day. The important thing to remember is that you are receiving very targeted traffic that will be interested in what you have to say on your site. Getting such targeted traffic anywhere else these days can be very difficult without spending on PPC or other forms of advertising.