Yahoo answers to no one

Yahoo has recently launched Yahoo Answers which has been getting a lot of buzz around the blogosphere. The concept of Yahoo Answers is very similar to Google Answers. The Yahoo Answers section has a great design, but they have made some critical SEO and usability mistakes.

Search Engine Optimization

Yahoo has its own search engine and you would think that any little project that they release would at least be optimized to maximize their exposure to the search engines. Here are some of the major mistakes they have made:

  1. URLs are not search engine friendly. Currently the URLs are long and have tons of extraneous characters. The reason you want clean URLs is so the search engines can index all of the pages and rank them with ease.
  2. If you are going to use the meta keywords tag, the keywords should be more relevant to each page and less generic.
  3. A sitemap should be added so that pages can be crawled with ease.
  4. The site could be more section 508 compliant. They should also make better use of alt and title tags.
  5. Improve the use of headings tags.

Usability

Yahoo has done a decent job with the redesign of their new homepage, but they forgot to use some key elements that made the Yahoo homepage successful.

Yahoo Answers homepage
Yahoo Answers homepage

The homepage looks pretty attractive, but there are some flaws that popped out at me:

  1. The three boxes at the top (ask, answer, and discover) look like they are steps, but they are not. Plus in the answer box they featured a "question" and not an "answer". The discover box is also confusing; I can't help but wonder, "What is this about?"
  2. Right under the search box they have a yellowish box with text inside. "Ask The Planet kicks off with Marilyn vos Savant asking how parents can help kids excel in school." I understand that this section is meant to highlight the new "Ask The Planet" campaign that Yahoo is promoting, but I would think that people are coming to Yahoo Answers to either find answers to questions or ask questions, not learn how this campaign was kick started.
  3. They have a vote tab where it shows some type "Undecided questions" results when you click it. The way they designed and labeled it is very confusing. When you click on it, do you vote on results or do you search for results?
  4. In the footer there are links to international Yahoo Answer sites, but why are they listed out like that? If you live in the UK and try to go to Yahoo Answers, it should take you to the UK version. If you type in the .com URL of Yahoo Answers, it should take you to the United States version. The option to choose different international versions of Yahoo Answers is important, but it could have been made easier for the user.

The internal pages of Yahoo Answers also scream out at me. Yahoo Answers internal

  1. If you look at the left side, they have categories with options under it. Some of the categories are more then one level deep and every time you select an option a new page is loaded. I can guess that they might have made a new page load every time to increase the amount of page views on the website. For SEO purposes, if their URL structure was proper, they could obtain a greater benefit from these extra pages. It might even be considered more usable to users if the category content changed without a page reload, using Ajax.
  2. Also the results bar at the bottom allows you to navigate to different results pages. The number of results is listed, but how many pages are there? As shown in the screenshot below, digg.com has more usable way of displaying this pagination information.

digg results bar

Overall the Yahoo Answers site is not bad, but some improvements would do wonders. It seems that Yahoo was heading in the right direction with the redesign of their homepage, but they can really improve on the Yahoo Answers website. Hopefully this is just the first of what Yahoo Answers is and it becomes more usable as well as search engine friendly in the future.

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Reader Comments (2)

Udi, June 13, 2006

Hi Neil,

Interesting thoughts. I don't quite agree with all that you've said, but the paging and SEO comments are certainly fair. SEO improvements are in the pipeline for Answers and have been in the plan all along. Our focus has been on usability and quality first, and things like SEO will come as soon as we have a little time to breath ;)

Thanks! Udi (Speaking unofficially, of course)

Neil Patel, June 13, 2006

Hey, I appreciate your comments. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I'm a real person trying to use your site and these are the frustrations that I experienced.

It is pretty cool that you guys are keeping track of your buzz. :-)