Question and answer content has been around on the internet a lot longer than the web. From the early days of usenet (and before that, on prehistoric technologies that came before my time) people have been asking experts for answers. You can’t fail to have noticed, however, that it has resulted in some of the lowest quality content on the web. For far too many questions, the ranking answer is Yahoo! Answers (or similar) that looks as though it was written by someone who found writing YouTube comments too intellectually challenging:
Incidentally, note that there is a Yahoo! Answers API which can be a great source of data for keyword research and content inspiration.
There is a clear need and opportunity for this kind of content. Many users search in question format:
Unfortunately not quite enough to support the venerable Ask Jeeves that encouraged this behaviour.
There are clearly a lot of commercially-oriented queries in there. You only have to look at many of the kinds of questions people ask on Twitter to see this.
You can see the attraction to search engines of indexing Q&A content. While they have made leaps forward in natural language processing, they are still dumb text query engines at heart and having both the question and the answer in plain text on the page clearly supports them in providing efficient answers to many natural language queries.
My favourite example of the right way of doing things is Stackoverflow. If you have ever tried to do anything related to programming, you will have hit annoying issues very early on. At Distilled we have labelled most programming as “copy, paste, swear, fix typo”.
If you’re anything like me, RTFM might as well stand for JFGI these days and you will Just Google It(TM) straight away. As soon as you do this (certainly in recent months), odds are you are going to land on Stackoverflow. The answer you find there is likely to be helpful, authoritative and on you go. But how did it get that way? Stackoverflow is clearly good for search engines, but it got that way by being great for users. If anything, the experience of asking a question and getting it answered is even more impressive than just seeing the repository of brilliant answers that already exist.