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
-
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
No designated 404 page, but any made-up URL path displays homepage Good / Bad?
I have a custom website where if you type in companyxyz.com/_any-made-up-url _it displays the homepage. So then you will see the homepage and in the URL bar the made up URL path remains visible "companyxyz.com/any-made-up-url" Is this good or bad or not an issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Meta refresh bad for SEO
Hi there, Some external developers have created a wishlist for a website that allows visitors to add products to a wishlist and then send an enquiry. Very similar set-up to a shopping basket really (without the payment option). However, this wishlist lives in a separate iframe and refreshes every 30 seconds to reflect any items visitors add to their wishlist. This refreshing is done with a meta refresh. I'm aware of the obvious usability issue that the visitor's product only appears after 30 seconds in their wishlist. However, are there also any SEO issues due to the refreshing of the iframe every 30 seconds? Please let me know, whether small or large issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbern0 -
Adding videos to a website
Hello! We are producing multiple videos (each about 1-minute long) for a company website. We have decided to use Wistia to host them, in order get the full SEO benefits of links to the videos. I have two questions: 1. Would it definitely be better for SEO to divide up the videos and place them on the various existing pages of the site that are related to the video content, rather than putting all the videos together on a separate video page? 2. If we do put different videos on different pages, would it be a bad idea also to have a video page with all the videos together? Would this be considered duplicate content? Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
Multiple Author Rich Snippets On A Q&A Forum Page
Hi, I work on a site that has a robust q&a forum. Members post questions and other members answer the questions. The answers can be lengthy, often by experts with Google+ pages and almost always by multiple member/commenters answering a particular question. Much like Moz's forum here. In order to get rich snippets results in search for a single Q&A page, what would happen if each of, for instance, 10 commenters on a page, were tagged as author? After all, the q/a forum pages have many authors, each as author of their own comments. Or, should I pick one comment out of many and call that member/commenter the author or something else? If it matters, the person asking the question in the forum is almost always not the expert providing a ton of detailed content. Also, a question might be 8 words. One answer might be 25 to 500 or more and their might be 5 to 10 different answers. Thanks! Cheers... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Redirection - Seo trick?
Hi, After analyzing the site I found several Redirections of exact match domains. With different domain name extensions. Is Seo trick? Is the second website which i fond that is using this technique. Can anyone gives more details? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Mobile SEO vs. normal SEO?
Hi everyone, I wanted to ask you abour your opinon on mobile SEO. Do we already have two different Indices, one for mobile, one for desktop? Except a few mobile listings I don't see a difference yet. If yes, do I need to do special mobile SEO for my site or is it enough to have e.g. a responsive webdesign which detects the device and shows a different page? Are there any other extra Mobile SEO measures that should be considered? I know of the Mobile Sitemap and directories but is there anything else? Best regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrazySEO0 -
Wordpress blog integration with full website effect on SEO
I have searched and searched for the answer to this question and can't find it. We are going to be launching a Wordpress blog on our domain shortly, however we have a much larger site that is mixed with static and dynamic pages full of custom programming tied to databases, etc. that we are running around the blog and can't integrate that into Wordpress due to its complexity. What this means is we have to install Wordpress on our servers somehow separate from the pages of our website. What I am wondering is if we run Wordpress in the /blog directory of our site as a separate installation if it will inherit the domain authority of our domain (currently around 60) or if it will be viewed as a separate site and get no ranking. Also, will our main site inherit the additional link juice from the inbound links that we get from the blog with it being separate from the main site? How does this need to be setup on our webservers to ensure the blog gets authority of the domain, and the blog contributes maximum SEO value to the domain? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0