Link Building on Quora: Is it Useful for SEO?

Why Bother with Quora ?

• Every month, Quora serves over 500 million visitors. The community is huge, and a perfect place to build up your online presence and brand awareness.
• The DR of Quora is 91. Despite the links being nofollow (more on that in a bit), their domain is very trustworthy and often shows up in search results. 
• Google never said that links built on Quora are disregarded or not taken into account.

Here’s what John Mueller said about link-building on Quora.

This guy is known for giving vague answers all the time, but the fact that he doesn’t discourage us from building links on Quora is already a good sign. 

Is Quora useless for SEO purposes?

No, it’s not! Even though nofollow links from Quora don’t pass a lot of page speed juice, it doesn’t make those links useless. They bring some indirect benefits for your SEO, namely:

• These nofollow links are great for diversification purposes. Remember, we discussed how a healthy backlink profile should always consist of both dofollow and follow links? Well, that’s where Quora links can make a contribution and make your link portfolio look more natural.

• These links (or even linkless mentions) have a positive effect on your EAT. As you know, EAT (expertise, authority, trust) is an important ranking factor for search engines. This concerns all kinds of websites, not only YMYL niches as it used to be. Having social discussions on Quora increases your brand trust, and thus EAT.

• If you are an active contributor of knowledge in your field, you can drive some quality traffic to your website. Remember, that sometimes people click on your links and visit your website. 

Therefore, you can definitely bring in a few more leads or customers by posting useful answers on Quora. Not to mention, that behavioral factors (such as time spent on page) also contribute to your SEO.

• You don’t face any risk. Google severely punishes websites who engage in black hat SEO methods, but this one is not one of them. Thus, you can safely use this technique without worrying that your rankings will suddenly drop.

How can you leverage Quora to build backlinks to your website?

The process behind link-building on Quora is actually not that different from crowd marketing.

Here’s a checklist that you can follow:

• Find questions that relate to your niche. 

Simply break down your topic into a short list of keywords that people definitely use when asking questions. 

For example, if your niche is “auto repair”, you would search for terms like:

• Car repair
• Repair a broken car
• Vehicle repair

And the list goes on..

If you’re stuck and out of keywords in mind, you can use AnswerThePublic to check some popular questions around your subject. Alternatively, you can use any keyword suggestion tool like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs or SEMRush.

• Answer questions with relevant keywords using the Q-Stats Quora Marketing Tool 

Take a look at the example question above. Using the free Q-Stats – Quora Marketing Tool, you can see the question ranks for 39 keywords, and generates about 2,882 clicks from Google per month.

Q-Stats displays the top performing keywords so you know exactly the keywords that are driving the most traffic from Google.

In short, if you are trying to drive traffic to your website by people who search these keywords, you should link relevant keywords in your answer to your website.

You can download Q-stats for free from the Google Chrome store.

• Write genuine and helpful answers.

If you want people to think that you’re a thought leader in your subject – you should write long and detailed answers.

Delve into the subject and answer the question in as much detail as possible. Crowdo Team advises to write at least 1800 symbols of text in your answer, but it depends on the exact topic.

• Make your answer appealing.

Do you still remember some basic formatting guidelines that you’ve likely learned in school? Now is the time to use them! No need to get too fancy, but make your answer stand out visually.

Instead of writing a long paragraph with plain text, make use of headings, subheading, lists, bullet points, quotes. Other than that you can always attach an image or a video if it suits the context.

• Link organically.

Don’t just blindly promote your own project.

“Visit my website, it has the best stuff” , “ here is the link to what you need” and other clickbait call-to-actions will not work on Quora. Your answers will likely get flagged as spam and get collapsed (so users won’t see them).

Instead, link to your website/ website of your client when it’s actually appropriate. Preferably, you would do that in the middle or at the end of your text (just not in the beginning!).

Some good examples include:

If you can’t find a way to link your website properly in the main text – there’s a simple lifehack that will make your link look natural. Simply put a heading that says “references” or “sources” (as they do on Wikipedia) at the end of your answer and that’s where you can leave a backlink to your site too.

It’s not perfect as less people click on those links, but they almost always look natural.

• Don’t just link to your website alone

Other than that, don’t just link to your website in the exact same way in every single answer. Diversify your linking pattern and link to some high-authority sources within your answer. 

Examples include:

• Wikipedia
• YouTube
• Reddit
• Forbes
• Entrepreneur

The Greatest Pitfall of All: Collapsed Answers

And here comes the sad truth. You’ve done your research, wrote some awesome answers, yet they are collapsed..

There may be multiple reasons why this happens, and most likely your answer violates some of the Quora Content Guidelines.

There is no way to tell for sure why your answer has been collapsed, as Quora uses an algorithm for that.

We have actually had a few cases when our answers have been collapsed for (we think) no reason, and after we opened a support ticket – the support staff has made our answers visible manually.

You probably don’t want to open a support ticket every single time your answer is flagged, so here are some common reasons to avoid your answers being collapsed and some tips that you can apply:

Reason 1: Your User Profile is not Deemed Trustworthy

Here is what beginners often do. Create a user profile and start linking immediately. This approach is wrong and will never work. 

This includes:

• Full name
• Biography
• Profile picture (use a photo)
• Credentials & highlights (you can easily copy this from LinkedIn)

Reason 2: You are Overlinking/ Spamming

Once again, there is no reason to be in a rush and start linking to your website immediately. This will be considered pure spamming and all of your answers will be removed. And if you were planning to automate this procedure this bots – then there is a high chance your profile will be blocked permanently. 

There is no exact science here, but as a rule of thumb: write at least 10-20 long and helpful answers before placing any links.

Reason 3: Your Answers Lack Social Proof

Even though you think your answer is awesome, if it lacks social signals and interaction from other members – that raises a concern for the Quora algorithm.

You don’t necessarily have to take this route, as if you post frequently – you will likely receive both comments and upvotes organically.

Reason 4: Your Answers Don’t Actually Answer the User’s Question

If you think that’s a rather weird point – you’ll be surprised at how many people post a long story with tons of references, yet with no clear answer to the question asked initially.

Reason 5: Your Answers are not Unique

If your text has been copied (completely or partially) from somewhere else – it may also get flagged as violating Quora’s policies, as in the algorithm’s mind you are not making any contribution.

If you want to use your own text (say, from a blog article of yours) – make it clear that you’re referencing/ copying your own work. 

Either way – don’t copy and paste large chunks of text and quote sparingly.

Let’s Check Out a Few Examples

Now let’s take a look at a few answers that follow the best practices discussed above.

This answer was posted by a member of the Crowdo Team. We think it’s a solid answer because:

• The text contains over 1800 symbols and goes in a reasonable amount of detail to answer the question
• The text contains a natural link to our blog, as well as a supporting YouTube video
• The answer has social proof (25 upvotes, 3 comments)
• It has 8.2 organic views which means it showed up in users’ feed frequently.

If you want to check out other examples of our work in action, you may check out the rest of our samples right here.

Conclusion

Spreading the word around your business on Quora (and especially building links) can be challenging. Yet you get rewarded with increased EAT, some traffic to your website and backlinks for diversification.

If you find that all of the methods described in our guide take way too much time – we don’t blame you!

What you can do is check out some Quora packages that Crowdo offers. We will craft an entire promotional campaign for you and follow all the white hat practices to make sure you get feasible results!