Yahoo Answer Feed – How To Add It To Your Google Reader ?

Answering questions on Yahoo Answers is an excellent way to get links to the web pages that you want ranked well. Go to Yahoo Answers and search for the questions that are relevant to the keywords you are targeting and answer these questions – and end your answer with your name and a link to your relevant web page.

Make sure you don’t spam – by this mean I mean two things:

• Don’t add a link to your web page if the question is totally on an unrelated topic. Example – there is a question about car repair, your web page is about eyebrows. You are free to answer the question about car repair but it makes no sense to add the link to your eyebrows web page. Makes no sense – only affects your credibility.
• Add something meaningful – don’t go there with the intention of just getting a link – put some time, effort and thought into your answer.

Going everyday to Yahoo Answers and searching for relevant questions for the various keywords you are targeting is a waste of time – instead add a rss feed of the questions to Google Reader and this way you have only one place to go and all your questions are displayed in this one place.

You can select the category in Yahoo Answers (eg: Beauty and Style) and add the entire category’s rss feed to your Google reader. But this will give you huge set of questions and most of them can be irrelevant to what you are targeting – If you are targeting ‘eyebrows’ then do an advanced search in yahoo answers for ‘eyebrows’ and add the feed for that keyword to your Google reader.

I always use the Advanced Search facility in Yahoo answers – filters out the questions and lets you target only the relevant questions. Adding the rss feed from advanced search facility is sometimes not that obvious (at least for me .

So, I have listed the steps involved in adding the Yahoo Answer Feed to your Google Reader:

1. Go To Yahoo Answers
2. Click Advanced – Located next to Search button
3. Type in the keyword. Example: I am after questions relating to ‘eyebrows’. So I type in eyebrows in the keyword field.
4. Under ‘Search for keyword match in:’ select ‘Questions’.
5. Under ‘Question Status’ select Open Questions – ‘Best answer has not been chosen’. Why would you want to read questions that are already closed. You are only interested in open questions – questions that you can answer
6. Click Search
7. The search results will be displayed. At the bottom of the results you will find an option for adding the answers to your RSS. (like the image shown below)
   
8. Click RSS
9. Copy the url from the page that follows (the page that shows up after you click RSS)
10. Go to Google Reader
11. Click ‘Add a Subscription’
12. Paste the URL and click ‘Add’

That’s it – you have now successfully added the yahoo answer feed for the keyword you are after to your google reader.

Now one quick point here – sometimes when there are no search results then the RSS section will not be displayed (refer to point 7). There might be no results today but there might be some tomorrow. So, you will still have to add the feed to my google reader. But how do you get the url of the feed (point 9) ?

I have a little trick – I go back and search for something very common – say ‘car repairs’. Then I get the url for this search feed and replace ‘car repairs’ with the keyword I am after.

Make sure answering questions on Yahoo Answers is a part of your search engine optimization efforts. It will for sure make a difference to your rankings.

Best,