I totally agree with your comment above, both about Yahoo answers and with Wikipedia.

Your point about Wikipedia brings up another peeve of mine about the internet and in particular Google. Outside of my problems with Yahoo Answers I like Yahoo and MSN as search engine, however (and I know I am in the minority) I do not care for Google as much as they give way to much prominence to “authority” links (such as Wikipedia or CNN). This plays out often again in my field that anecdotal snake aquarium information sites come up ahead of real research sites. My information site; http://americanaquariumproducts.com/Aquarium_Information.html does well on MSN and Yahoo but not so on Google in part because even though I have a lot of good one way hyperlinks, a lot of ezines with good research, and a lot of forums references, Google gives little value to them (unlike Yahoo, MSN). This has been even more true lately as even the amount of links to this site are growing rapidly (organic), Google has further devalued them in favor of “expensive” authority links. And those who say content will bring in quality back links are very ignorant of the very petty and dishonest pet industry.

IMHO, if one just goes to Yahoo Answers and starts throwing up a bunch of wrong or irrelivant info with a link, that’s spam in my book.

On the other hand, if I go there and spend an hour answering some questions for people who need quality answers, I should at least be able to leave a few of my links laying around for the time I’ve spent there.

I do see where you’re coming from. I have some of the same gripes about Wikipedia. That’s probably why they made Wiki edit capable. But, you know, just because it’s on Wiki, people take that stuff as gospel!

Don

I agree with sharing ones experience, however the way Yahoo answers is currently set up it rewards those with too much time on their hands which results (at least my category of expertise; fish) in very poor anecdotal answers getting passed around as fact. The so called top contributor here is especially poor in the field of disease treatment and medication yet many recognize otherwise and he is believed.
There is no way someone who has a career (in my case performing real research and more) to be a top contributor, so the best I can hope for is to go in there and give out better information (http://www.americanaquariumproducts.com/Aquarium_Information.html ) backed by good resources and hope others reading this will follow these links, however most of the time this is not the case.

I am not against going there to try and give out correct advice or simply to try and move persons to more credible resources however in the threads I usually have answered posting links is a necessity to get the correct information out, as you cannot give a good answer without more outside resources, information, and often pictures and thankfully in one of the few plusses I can say for Yahoo Answers is that the links I have posted (which are all to add further information) have not caused any problems.

Hopefully Yahoo will recognize the problems and do away with the “top contributor” and voting features which tend to exacerbate the poor information problems there.

I outline this in this blog: http://fish-as-pets.blogspot.com/

I posted that article yesterday morning and wrote it in a hurry. Here’s a few more tips.

Female avatars seem to get better results. Not sure why.

You should mix up the links you giving out. Never just give out the link to your site. If someone (say for example…an Answers editor?) checks your profile and reads your past answers and all they see are links to your site…busted.

Don over at AffiliateWatcher blogged today about:

Yahoo Answers – Drive Targeted Traffic To Your Site…

This is exactly why I read your blog: you come up with stuff that has never occurred to me.

Good post!

I’m not sure how I managed to post this same comment on the wrong post, but I did. Doh!