Is Q&A on a website good or bad for SEO?
-
I am considering adding a Q&A section to my website and I have a few questions for you PROs!:
-
is it a good thing for SEO? Or a potential pitfall for SEO? If it is used often and users post relevant topics related to the website content, will it help the overall DA and websites SERP performance?
-
Are there inherent risks for website security when using a Q&A?
-
Are there any other questions I should be asking?
I am using Joomla! 3.0 with Stackideas Easy discuss/easy social.
Thanks for any advice!
BB
-
-
Great feedback! Thanks! Now I am thinking about moderating ALL comments and approve the ones that are quality, and delete the ones that aren't. The submit auto response could say "thank you for submitting your question, you will receive an email once an answer to your question is submitted. So, if their question is bad, then they won' t receive an answer (ever). So basically I filter out the bad from the good and build a high quality Q&A for future users to search through, and eliminate the "thin" and "spam" issue. So, I won't have to delete bad questions, they will never even make it on the site.
I just probably won't get much repeat activity from the users who posted bad content that never make it to the forum. But this is not intended to be an online community, it's going to just be a place for quick questions on a specific topic.
Thanks for your time in responding to me! I appreciate it!
BB
-
I run a Q&A site that does quite well. There can be issues to watch out for. You have to monitor all user generated content. If users are allowed to create links I would make them all nofollowed links otherwise you'll end up getting people spamming the site just to create a link for themselves.
The biggest challenge is making sure that you don't have thin pages that get indexed. Let's say you have a site where 10 pages are your important business pages and then you've got 2000 Q&A pages. Of those 2000 Q&A pages let's say that the majority of them are pages that contain short or unhelpful answers. All of a sudden a huge percentage of your site can be deemed low quality by Google and your entire site, not just the Q&A section can be severely affected by Panda.
There are ways to make sure that this doesn't happen. The easiest is monitoring all of the questions and applying a noindex tag or deleting ones that are unlikely to be helpful to someone who is doing a Google search. But, if you have a lot of user generated content another possible solution is to programatically apply a noindex tag to any content that is short or that has a higher bounce rate than a certain number. I'm not saying that bounce rate is necessarily a Panda factor, but if your bounce rate is normally 30% and a particular page is consistently having 90% of users bounce away then that can be a sign that that page is not a high quality one.
-
I think q and a is great for website, i use that all the time, i think people search for things in different ways. Some search by phrases and some ask for things in a question form, so that being said if you word the question on your site like someone would be search for it, it may help.
-
Hi BBuck,
I think I can help out in this area;
- is it a good thing for SEO?
A Q&A section can absolutely be beneficial to SEO. Any value-added content to relevant topics is great to include in your website and User Generated Content (UGC) is a goal of many successful SEO strategies.
- Or a potential pitfall for SEO?
It's a pitfall if it is not value-added (spammy) or negative to your business objectives.
- If it is used often and users post relevant topics related to the website content, will it help the overall DA and websites SERP performance?
Consistency is a common trait of successful campaigns and value-added, topic related content has a high impact on domain authority (DA) and search engine ranking position (SERP) performance. It can only help you achieve your goals when used properly.
- Are there inherent risks for website security when using a Q&A?
That would depend on your own unique website environment (server host, plugins, ect) and I would encourage you to have consistent communication with your hosting provider and website manager.
Make sure to continue to screen UGC for spam related content, non-value added content, and other innapropriate content.
- Are there any other questions I should be asking?
Yeah, most of the time Here are a few to keep you thinking...
Are you making it easy for your users to ask questions?
Are you making it easy for those responsible to answer questions?
Should you require a login/purchase/information to post questions?
Where should you show the questions? (from a UI perspective, has more impact for ecommerce companies)
Best of luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Proxy Servers & SEO
Does putting a blog on a proxy server (the pointed at the main site) hurt SEO? i.e. can Google tell? And if they can, does it matter? My server people won't use PHP on their servers but we want a Wordpress blog. So their suggested solution is that they put the blog on a proxy server and point it at the ourdomain.com/blog subfolder on our site. So to all intents and purposes it's hosted in the same place. They assure me this is normal practice and point out that our (main site) images are already being sourced from a CDN. Obviously we'll deal with Google not seeing two separate versions of the same site. But apart from this, is there any negative effect we could suffer from in SEO terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abisti20 -
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
App "Review" Website with DA of 58 - Good or Bad Link?
Hi, We have a web app. All our competitors are on http://www.appappeal.com. We can suggest ourselves here http://www.appappeal.com/contact/suggest. If we get reviewed and the link is a follow link is this a good thing or a bad thing. They call themselves a directory and you can pay to get a "priority" review. Should we avoid or is it a good link as the DA is 58?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Suggestions for a SEO Review
I think it would be beneficial to have a third party seo review of the network of sites my team and I manage and was wondering if any of you had suggestions for what sort of tests should be done or that we should expect to see done during one of these reviews. We are a small team who has varying seo experience and have been working hard to make improvements to our sites in the past year. Most of our sites have been completely overhauled in the last 12-16 months and seo work that had not been done in the past has been setup, along with some corrections that may have been harming seo. We believe we are on the right track and have learned a good amount about seo in that time, but it would be nice to have some "expert" feedback outside of our office to get a clearer picture on anything we may be missing or some suggested improvements. A sort of double check on the work we have done.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unikey0 -
Nofollow in site archutecture. Good or bad in 2013?
We have been using nofollow links to create a silo architecture. is this a good idea or should we stay away from using this on our site. Its an eCommerce site with about 3000+ pages so not sure of the best architecture. ideas and suggestions on best practice welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Am I Doing This Wrong? Ecommerce SEO
I ran my site through the SEOMoz On-Page Optimization tool and one of the problems noted was "Keyword Self-Cannibalization" in this case, it was stating I was using the keyword "Board Games" too much. Site in question: http://theboardgamers.co.uk/ The problem being is that every product link contains the word "Board Game" - Which makes sense, but I guess it may look spammy to the SEO world. Would it be best to remove the "board game" part from each internal link and only leave it in the URL structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | REMOVE560 -
Iframe redirect bad for SEO?
Hi, I have a website (http://www.blowingminds.de) wich I put a spreadshirt shop into via iframe. The thing is I am not sure on how the iframe effects my SEO? Can I just optimise the main domain for search? Well I want the spreadshirt shop to be found under the domain name (www.blowingminds.de) but the only real way to do it is by implementing an iframe because each spreadshirt shop has its own subdomain eg.: blowingminds.spreadshirt.de but the only real way to do it is via iframe, as they do not offer a complete domain redirect. (Or have I overseen some other way?) I hope you guys can help me on this one 🙂 Thanks in advance. Malte
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellbo1 -
Domains for regional websites
Please take a look at 7city.com This landing page contains links to: www.7city.co.uk www.7city.ae www.7city.com.sg and our US website which is also www.7city.com It is programmed so: If you are a first time user and type www.7city.com you go to the landing page above. If you then click on AMERICAS, it sets a cookie and directs you to http://www.7city.com/home . When you revisit www.7city.com in the future as the cookie is set you will be automatically sent to the AMERICAS website i.e http://www.7city.com/home. Our US websites is nor performing well on organic ranking compared to other regional website. Is the above technique hindering our organic ranking in the US. Also, I have been led to believe that you get a higher ranking if the domain is specific to a country. Is this true? Does 7city.com receive higher ranking than if I created it as 7city.us for example? Many Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830