Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Marketing A New Q&a Site

Posted by aabajian on 7/25/2014 at 1:58 PM ET 125 Points
Hi all,

I'm a master's student in computer science @ Stanford. I've been working on a project to convert online forums into Q&A sites. For example, here's an original forum post:

https://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/236982-macbook-help.html

And here's my "goto: answer" version of it:

https://gotoanswer.stanford.edu/macbook_help-1333151/

What I've done is allow users to up-vote good answers. The site currently has 1 M questions and answers, but only from a limited scope - apple, mac, ios, iphone, etc. I can add 1 M questions in about a week and about basically any topic (that has an existing forum).

I'm more of a technical geek than a marketer, so I'm having trouble getting anyone to visit the site. I'd appreciate your feedback on thoughts about how I can improve the site and increase its traffic.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by mgoodman on 7/25/2014 at 3:37 PM Accepted
    Your situation is screaming for search advertising. When people have a technical/computer problem they often search for an answer using Bing, Yahoo, Ask or Google. If your ad is one of the top sponsored ads on the page you will get lots and lots of hits.

    If you need to learn more about this, I recommend "The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords," by Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd. https://amzn.to/L89mpf

    An effective Adwords campaign won't improve your site, but it will increase traffic dramatically and quickly.

    (... from a former Stanford grad school student)
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 7/25/2014 at 5:32 PM Accepted
    Instead of trying to get everyone to visit your site, why not work with an existing forum provider and offer to run a side-by-side (perhaps a A/B split) test using the Q&A format? They'll provide the traffic, and you'll provide the alternate choice. Assuming the Q&A also provides analytics, you'll be able to get data about visitors/interest/time-on-page, etc.

    Otherwise, if you're hoping to ramp up your test project into a full business, you're going to need more than simply traffic (Michael's AdWords suggestion is great) - you're going to need a full business plan.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 7/26/2014 at 10:07 PM Accepted
    You may be better off hosting this content on your own domain name. Having a Stanford.edu domain may be burying your content.
  • Posted by aabajian on 7/26/2014 at 11:24 PM Author
    Hi all,

    Thanks for the ideas!

    @mgoodman - I would like to run an ad campaign once I have some organic traffic. I checked out the book you recommended and it looks promising.

    @Jay Hamilton-Roth - I'm active on a couple of different forums and may reach out to the owners about a co-operative arrangement. The difficulty is that my site may end up taking a lot of their traffic - I'm showing the same content in a more accessible (i.e. sorted) way.

    @Gary Bloomer - This is quite an actionable suggestion. Can you provide some background on why this would be affecting my indexing? This article...

    https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/3496/do-subdomains-help-hurt...

    ...says that Google will not show multiple results from subdomains on the same root domain. So, for example, if there was a "gotoanswer.stanford.edu/page_1" and "quickanswer.stanford.edu/page_1", then Google would only show one because otherwise webmasters could just duplicate content. this doesn't really affect me because my content is quite different than anything on stanford.edu (as far as I can tell).

    Not that I've already purchased gotoanswer.com, I was just using the Stanford domain in the meantime while I perform testing and outside validation.

    It is my hope to turn this into a working venture further down the road. I think there is a wealth of information in online forums that is just...disorganized. I'm trying to model my business after a site like Answers.com / Yahoo Answers / StackExchange / etc. The big difference is that users cannot submit questions or answers to my site. They can simply rank existing questions and answers found on the web that were previously ordered chronologically.
  • Posted by saul.dobney on 7/27/2014 at 7:17 AM Accepted
    You have a very big potential issue over copyright. You'll find that people like mac-forums retain the copyright over forum comments and you can't just rip them off or steal traffic without raising the possibility of legal action from them. Some sites do and have run a similar service to the one you propose already (it's not a new idea), but they've tended to pull content from Usenet newsgroups where copyright is not so clear cut. Harvesting may also breach forum terms and conditions and you can easily find your harvester IP addresses blocked.

    Secondly, Google itself has been trying to ignore or penalise duplicated content because content harvesters have tried to use this type of approach for black-hat SEO, so often Google will not index second-sourced content.

    Some of the internet is still a bit Wild West, so it could work, but my guess is that if it becomes popular the forums will attempt to close you down.
  • Posted by aabajian on 7/27/2014 at 2:00 PM Author
    @saul.dobney - Hi Saul, I am concerned about this as well. I believe my use case falls under "fair use" because the technology adds additional structure (like a search engine) to the content. Eventually I won't show low-voted answers and only show the relevant content (like Google shows a search result snippet underneath each link).
  • Posted by saul.dobney on 7/28/2014 at 3:20 AM Member
    I'd get some advice from someone who properly understands fair use requirements. My feeling would be that it doesn't apply in this case. Adding structure is just creating a derivative work so copyright restrictions will still apply.
  • Posted on 8/13/2014 at 2:01 AM Member
    You're right you should promote it using different kind of strategy such as link building and other kind of internet marketing strategies so you can get what you want for your business or website.Well to be honest i also use to do it when i am promoting my own blog for being a project manager at [link removed] and i proven that internet marketing strategy and some seo strategy help my blog to be well known.
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