10e20 Blog

Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven information exchange website that allows users to ask and answer questions posed by other users. You can either ask a question (ex. What is the fastest animal?) or answer questions (ex. The cheetah). The question asker then gets to pick which is the best answer and users are rewarded with points. In the “Answer” space, it is the clear leader even leading Google to close its own Google Answers service back in November. Yahoo is starting to really push this service (I actually heard live read commercial for it this morning on ESPN Radio) and its popularity has not gone unnoticed by marketers. When used effectively, it is a great way to send very targeted traffic to your website.

Once a service starts to get more popular the propensity for gaming it will increase. That’s just a natural law of the online world. You want to put more time into something that will give you a better return on said time. So over the last few months I have been watching a thread in the Yahoo! Forums called Yahoo! Deactivating accounts because of “Answers”. In this thread scores of users talk about being banned from Yahoo! Answers due to many different reasons:

I recently had a 10 year old yahoo account deactivated because some of my “answers” were not liked by others. I was therefore singled out by some(one) and “reported” constantly. Needless to say, I lost alot of information and services and will no longer consider yahoo a stable platform as a portal.

In this question, someone asks If you are banned from yahoo answers, are you banned from all of yahoo too? Interestingly enough, it looks like there are two answers:

1) If you are banned for violating the Community Guidelines, you are banned from Yahoo! Answers. You can access your account, but you cannot use Yahoo! Answers. You keep your email, 360 and any pay services.

2) If you are banned for violating the Terms Of Service, your entire account will be deactivated. You loose your email and any information stored within. You do not have a period to collect important information.

Just like with any other popular social networking site, there are a few things that you should keep in mind in order to play it safe and still be able to leverage the system effectively and not get banned:

* Build up a natural profile. Become a good resource for people by asking and answering questions

* Don’t use sock puppet accounts. If you really insist on this, at least use different IPs (be consistent with them) and build natural profiles for those accounts.

* Don’t be controversial. Many of the people had their accounts banned simply because they said things that other users didn’t like and they were constantly reported. Apparently it’s very easy for this to happen (from user eruditeftw: If one person on here doesn’t like you ( Or your answers) they will target you and get you deactivated.)

* Have a proportionate number of good answers to link drops. This would be akin to constantly submitting your own stories on Digg. If you’re only going on Yahoo! Answers to drop links to your websites, it’s going to be very obvious. Answers has a very vigilant community and they will report people who they think are spamming. Definitely drop links to your sites but make sure there is a good answer around them and that you are answering other questions.

* Don’t use a Yahoo! account that you use for anything important. Hopefully you’re not using a Yahoo! email account for anything mission critical but just to be on the safe-side, set-up an account that you won’t really care if it does get banned. Because if you are banned for violating their TOS, everything will get nuked.

With Yahoo! Answers many of the same rules apply as other social networks and there is one important one to remember: the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

Posted by Chris Winfield at 1:07 pm
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