Easy traffic from answers sites

[Potatoe]

Sites like Yahoo answers, etc... I still get traffic from posts that I made years ago. Here's the basic template...

Account 1 on my main IP.
Account 2 on a vps or a cheap windows box.

Account 1 asks a question .
Account 2 answers with a link.

It's really that simple. Spend some time and use both accounts to post other questions, other links, etc just to muddy up the waters if you plan on posting more than 1-2 of your own links.

Instead of spamming for that couple days of traffic, I treat the accounts really well and they've lasted me through many projects.

Just something I'm currently doing for a site so I figured I would make a quick post here in the Orientation Room. This isn't anything ground breaking, but it's a nice way to get another Top 10 spot with your link on it for some of your less competitive keywords, to keep a competitor out of that spot, and to get a slow, steady trickle of traffic for years to come.

Cheers.

 

[stackcash]

I like this a lot.

How many times do you use the "answer account" to drop your links? I'd imagine anyone looking at your post history will see that you're posting links to the same site over and over. Could get you banned, no?

 

[Tucky]

Yes I'd imagine a dozen or so accounts would work better and help keep you under the radar. More work of course but a stronger long-term strategy.

 

[Potatoe]

@stackcash
First time I did this, I posted my cloaked affiliate link on probabally 100 different posts, I didn't post anything else, just copied / pasted the same message and ended up making about 2 grand from those ~100 posts. That was about four years ago.

Now, I'm a lot more conservative with it because I'm trying to grow actual traffic and readership for an actual website so I usually just answer my own questions and the occasional relevant one that someone else answered. I will post a good handful of times with no links (You have to do this on some platforms anyways), then I'll drop a few links that aren't mine or related to my niche, then I'll post my link a few times, then I'll answer my own question... It seems to skirt the algo just fine, but you're correct that it probabally wouldn't pass human scrutiny if they were looking for a reason to delete my account.

I don't want to be that guy who is quietly following all the rules and stuck in traffic all day while everyone else is cruising past me using the shoulder of the road, so it's definitely a matter of finding the right balance. I think these sites have such a constant onslaught of actual spam with bots and stuff, that me manually dropping my link a couple times here and there won't ever really raise any flags.

@Tucky
Yeah if it's really doing a great job in a particular niche, that could work to bring in more traffic but I don't know... maybe a dozen thin accounts posting the same URL would raise even more flags than just one or two solid, aged accounts with histories of posting all sorts of different stuff?

 

[stackcash]

I don't want to be that guy who is quietly following all the rules and stuck in traffic all day while everyone else is cruising past me using the shoulder of the road, so it's definitely a matter of finding the right balance

^^^ This may be the most insightful thing ever said on this forum to date.

 

[jäger]

Although an oldie, this really is a goodie. Sometimes (often) you really just have to keep it simple and straight to the point

 

[NickEubanks]

Same can be done on pretty much any site with a gamified point/helpfulness algo - I've actually done this quite a bit on Facebook's help forums for problems posts where there is a product that solves the problem outside of Fb; for example when you want to share videos that are too big

 

[Tucky]

Ok I may be showing my naivety here but how do you do this sort of thing, like registering and commenting so they don't know it's from the same computer? Are there sites where you login through and they show different IP addresses? I have no idea. Is it the same as proxies? I know a fair bit about seo but have never gone down this route.

 

[built]

Ok I may be showing my naivety here but how do you do this sort of thing, like registering and commenting so they don't know it's from the same computer? Are there sites where you login through and they show different IP addresses? I have no idea. Is it the same as proxies? I know a fair bit about seo but have never gone down this route.

2 different browsers with spoof extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-spoofer/) and a good VPN should be enough, disable cookies or use incognito for added protection

 

[jstover77]

I also still get a bunch of traffic from old Yahoo Answers I did years ago.

Has anyone ventured into quora.com? Looks like it gets a good amount of traffic and I see it a lot in SERP results.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Has anyone ventured into quora.com?

I have. They have some algorithm that tries to measure the quality of your reply and it pissed me off before I cracked the code. I'm not sure if there was some manual approval process hidden at the start, but nothing I did was "good enough" despite it being leagues beyond other crap. I should go back and check to see if any of that was approved. I just wanted to drop some links, not parasite off of them.