The Yahoo Answers property has been the most used question and answer network on the net for years, despite the fact that the page has undergone virtually no updates. Yahoo had neglected this powerful, and popular, site for quite some time, but that is all changing. Yahoo announced that it is going to be rolling out a brand new user experience for the popular Q&A site, including a long time in coming mobile optimized page.
Yahoo Answers is the latest property in the massive Yahoo inventory to get a major overhaul sine CEO Marissa Mayer took over. She is, it seems, going through each of the Yahoo owned sites one by one and remodeling them with improved interfaces, features and other benefits. Of course, mobile optimization has been a priority since she took the position over a year ago.
Some of the new features being added to Yahoo Answers will allow the page to become much more social, which is clearly the online trend. People will be able to add images and videos to their questions or answers, which will help many people will enjoy. These updates will allow people to post more detailed questions, and get more complete answers in a timely manner.
Of course, Yahoo Answers has long been a popular tool for marketers who would seek out questions related to their products, and answer them with a link as a source. Many marketers even posted questions themselves, and went back to answer them with another account because of the fact that Yahoo Answers pages often came up high in the SERPs of all the major search engines.
The updates to the page will allow marketers to provide better answers, and undoubtedly drive additional traffic to their pages. If Yahoo can attract additional users through these updates, they will also be getting additional pages ranked in the search engines, making this property even more valuable to Yahoo and marketers in general.
Some of the specific updates which were announced include the following:
- The green color scheme is changing to purple, to better match the other Yahoo properties.
- A more personalized home page
- Current activity streams
- Photo & video options for questions and answers
- Activity notifications
- Mobile optimization
The updates will roll out to US users for both desktop and mobile over the next 10 days. Rolling the updates out to the rest of the world will undoubtedly come shortly after that, though no specific timeline has been given.
You can see the full announcement, including a video overview of the changes, HERE.
