Against my recommendation my buddy's company is using an "SEO company" that I think doesn't really know what they're doing. I'm not an expert in this by any means, but I know a little bit. This company is claiming links from your-answers.info are going to be beneficial to their SEO.

Looking at the site, it looks like they're just stealing content from Yahoo Answers, askville, and some other "Ask" type sites. Here's a couple of examples:

http://your-answers.info/cars/what-year-of-engine-will-fit-in-a-96-vw-cabriolet-convertible/
taken from
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090924174705AAEEuPz

http://your-answers.info/art/does-anyone-else-think-the-scoring-is-messed-up-on-michael-flatleys-dance-competition-on-nbc/
taken from
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090105174918AAkg9YG

et cetera ad nauseum. Nearly all the ones I tried came up on Yahoo Answers, most are a few years old... the your-answers site is only about a month old, so questions that are very out of date are claimed as being posted today :lmao: Hard to tell who's running this, but the domain was registered in Switzerland. I want to try posting a question or answer but don't really want to get a bunch of spam.

Now, the URL's of the your-answers are actually good, keywords there instead of a string of letters and numbers like Yahoo Answers. But, I can't believe google won't see through this b.s.

What do you all think of this? Is there SEO benefit from this zero pagerank shady looking site, or is he getting scammed? Thanks!

doing google searching for answers to questions I see this a lot. I will fine 5-6 copy's of yahoo answers or even forums copied in there entirety.

Here's a couple of examples:
http://your-answers.info/cars/what-year-of-engine-will-fit-in-a-96-vw-cabriolet-convertible/


The above example has a link to another site in the last answer. If you look at the source code, you will see that the link has "nofollow" assigned to the link relation attribute. Generally, this means that the link may not affect the referenced page's search engine ranking.

The above example has a link to another site in the last answer. If you look at the source code, you will see that the link has "nofollow" assigned to the link relation attribute. Generally, this means that the link may not affect the referenced page's search engine ranking.

Thank you for the reply, very interesting. I looked at a few other links in the comments sections and all had the "nofollow" tag.

So the nofollow attribute means that these outbound links offer the target site little to no SEO benefit or PR (pagerank), correct? Just want to understand how this works, thank you.

EDIT: And what's up with the HTML numbers, if you look at the source code it's full of ampersand pound 84 ; ampersand pound 104 ; ampersand pound 101 instead of "the", for example? Sorry, I tried to paste and it keeps converting the codes to "The" :lol:

So the nofollow attribute means that these outbound links offer the target site little to no SEO benefit or PR (pagerank), correct? Just want to understand how this works, thank you.

It is an instruction to the indexer's/crawlers not to follow the link. The original intention was to prevent spam in website comments. If the software for comments automatically put the nofollow attribute for any link in the comment sections, then spammers no longer have a reason to flood comment sections with their links (this was a major problem a few years back).

Each search engine decides what to do when its bot encounters the nofollow instruction. There have been reports that Googlebot will sometimes follow the link. However, no one outside Google really knows how Google's algorithm works and what affects page ranking, for better or for worse.

If an SEO company is saying that the way to increase your ranking in search engines is by having links to your site in comment sections, then they will need to explain why they believe this, considering that the links in the comments sections will automatically have a nofollow attribute.



EDIT: And what's up with the HTML numbers, if you look at the source code it's full of ampersand pound 84 ; ampersand pound 104 ; ampersand pound 101 instead of "the", for example?

If I had to guess, I would say it is their way of trying to hide from Google (and other indexers) that their page is a duplicate of Yahoo's. There is a belief that Google punishes sites/pages that duplicate content without a reference to the original page/site (cross domain canonical tag), or a "NoIndex" meta-tag instruction on the page.

I am not an expert at SEO. I have read a few books and done some research over the last few months. My knowledge is purely theoretical.

Personally, I think the your-answers website looks shady. If the site is designed to fool Google's algorithm for search engine rankings, then I would steer clear of it. If Google finds out about the website, they may choose to punish any website affiliated with it, or linked by it, by removing them from search engine results.

Thank you for the excellent info lebedev!