Once you’ve followed people in your usual networks like Twitter and Facebook, asking topical questions to do with your industry can reveal some very interesting answers and pave the way for some great discussions and information sharing from your peers:

What made me eventually commit to the network was the fact I was blown away by two things:

1. The number of my peers already signed up: it was staggering
2. The raw honesty from founders / business owners

Here’s a question illustrating the honesty on Quora. It’s asked about FriendFeed by Bret Taylor (the co-founder):

His answer (highlighted in yellow) was refreshingly straight to the point and honest. No sugarcoating.

How many times have you seen honesty like that on Twitter? Or responses from the founders themselves on LinkedIn? Or even questions like that on Yahoo! Answers? I can recall many wrongly-presumed accusations flying about on Twitter which usually ended up in a storm of misunderstandings due to the 140 character limit restricting people from explaining themselves fully.

Could Quora be the ideal platform to generate discussions and evoke honesty on hot topics?

What’s also interesting is that Robert Scoble, one of FriendFeed’s die hard users, has taken to Quora too.

Despite all of this honesty and the questions that have fuelled massively active discussions, I must agree with what many are saying; Quora’s concept is nothing new. It does perform better than the rival Q&A platforms namely LinkedIn Groups, Yahoo! Answers and Twitter, but will that be enough to ensure it’s not just a flash in the pan?

On that basis, all that’s needed is one of the older networks to update their platforms to encourage more interaction (perhaps through easier sign ups, more open public conversations and a better layout) and Quora is blown out of the water. Noone wants an extra network to log into so the only way Quora can guarantee survival is if it integrates – perhaps one of the aforementioned networks will make an offer?

Another curious question about Quora: why can’t you link directly to answers? At least a USP of Quora would be the ability to quote people within high profile blogs and news articles. (Mmm links!)

Follow me on Quora: Joanna Butler

No related posts.

Quora’s Curious Compulsion for Honesty is a post from: Search Engine Chocolate

Level: Beginner / Intermediate

Discovering Inbound Links

There have been some fantastic posts about discovering inbound links to websites, including competitive link searches, so I don’t want to simply rewrite what has already been said. Instead I’m going to outline the main methods and provide some starting points.

Google

Arguably the most popular search engine, it seems like the perfect place to start. Wrong. While Google provides a method to discover inbound links to a specific domain, its data is innaccurate at best. So what’s the benefit of using Google at all? If you are optimising specifically for Google, it’s useful to know which websites Google is currently aware of that are linking to you. In the search bar:

• link:www.domain.com or link:domain.com – finds the websites that Google is aware of that are linking to the specified domain
• www.domain.com or domain.com – finds instances of the specified domain being mentioned in text form (not necessarily linked)

Yahoo!

Yahoo! has the most accurate data on links and should be your main port of call when finding which websites are linking to you. To get the most out of Yahoo! use SiteExplorer. In the search bar:

• linkdomain:domain.com – site:domain.com or link:http://www.domain.com/ – site:domain.com – find web pages linking to the domain, excluding internal links within the website itself.

MSN Live

MSN isn’t as good as Yahoo! as its data is fairly incomplete, but it is reliable and it’s useful to know which websites MSN is aware of that link to you. In the search bar:

• linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com

Website Analytics Software

Using tracking software such as Google Analytics can also help you track websites that are linking to you, but they will only do this once a user has followed the link and not before. However, what the software will tell you is which websites referred the best quality visitors – that is those visitors who interacted the most with your website and converted.

Related posts:

1. Website Referrals Part 3: Useful or Useless?
2. Website Referrals: Who’s Linking to You?

Website Referrals Part 2: Discovering Inbound Links is a post from: Search Engine Chocolate