Is Q&A on a website good or bad for SEO?

[BBuck]

I am considering adding a Q&A section to my website and I have a few questions for you PROs!:

1. is it a good thing for SEO? Or a potential pitfall for SEO? If it is used often and users post relevant topics related to the website content, will it help the overall DA and websites SERP performance?

2. Are there inherent risks for website security when using a Q&A?

3. Are there any other questions I should be asking?

I am using Joomla! 3.0 with Stackideas Easy discuss/easy social.

Thanks for any advice!

BB

[Ray-pp]

Hi BBuck,

I think I can help out in this area;

- is it a good thing for SEO?

A Q&A section can absolutely be beneficial to SEO. Any value-added content to relevant topics is great to include in your website and User Generated Content (UGC) is a goal of many successful SEO strategies.

- Or a potential pitfall for SEO?

It's a pitfall if it is not value-added (spammy) or negative to your business objectives.

- If it is used often and users post relevant topics related to the website content, will it help the overall DA and websites SERP performance?

Consistency is a common trait of successful campaigns and value-added, topic related content has a high impact on domain authority (DA) and search engine ranking position (SERP) performance. It can only help you achieve your goals when used properly.

- Are there inherent risks for website security when using a Q&A?

That would depend on your own unique website environment (server host, plugins, ect) and I would encourage you to have consistent communication with your hosting provider and website manager.

Make sure to continue to screen UGC for spam related content, non-value added content, and other innapropriate content.

- Are there any other questions I should be asking?

Yeah, most of the time Here are a few to keep you thinking...

Are you making it easy for your users to ask questions?

Are you making it easy for those responsible to answer questions?

Should you require a login/purchase/information to post questions?

Where should you show the questions? (from a UI perspective, has more impact for ecommerce companies)

Best of luck!

[benjaminmarcinc]

I think q and a is great for website, i use that all the time, i think people search for things in different ways. Some search by phrases and some ask for things in a question form, so that being said if you word the question on your site like someone would be search for it, it may help.

[MarieHaynes]

I run a Q&A site that does quite well.  There can be issues to watch out for.  You have to monitor all user generated content.  If users are allowed to create links I would make them all nofollowed links otherwise you'll end up getting people spamming the site just to create a link for themselves.

The biggest  challenge is making sure that you don't have thin pages that get indexed.  Let's say you have a site where 10 pages are your important business pages and then you've got 2000 Q&A pages.  Of those 2000 Q&A pages let's say that the majority of them are pages that contain short or unhelpful answers.  All of a sudden a huge percentage of your site can be deemed low quality by Google and your entire site, not just the Q&A section can be severely affected by Panda.

There are ways to make sure that this doesn't happen.  The easiest is monitoring all of the questions and applying a noindex tag or deleting ones that are unlikely to be helpful to someone who is doing a Google search.  But, if you have a lot of user generated content another possible solution is to programatically apply a noindex tag to any content that is short or that has a higher bounce rate than a certain number.  I'm not saying that bounce rate is necessarily a Panda factor, but if your bounce rate is normally 30% and a particular page is consistently having 90% of users bounce away then that can be a sign that that page is not a high quality one.

[BBuck]

Great feedback! Thanks! Now I am thinking about moderating ALL comments and approve the ones that are quality, and delete the ones that aren't. The submit auto response could say "thank you for submitting your question, you will receive an email once an answer to your question is submitted. So, if their question is bad, then they won' t receive an answer (ever). So basically I filter out the bad from the good and build a high quality Q&A for future users to search through, and eliminate the "thin" and "spam" issue. So, I won't have to delete bad questions, they will never even make it on the site.

I just probably won't get much repeat activity from the users who posted bad content that never make it to the forum. But this is not intended to be an online community, it's going to just be a place for quick questions on a specific topic.

Thanks for your time in responding to me! I appreciate it!

BB