Yahoo Answers has been a staple of the internet for over 15 years, since June 28, 2005. Now, Yahoo is going to close it and not really provide an archive, like when they closed the Yahoo Directory – another piece of internet history. Yahoo Answers will go offline May 4th – I wonder why that date. 🙂
We wrote about Yahoo Answers here a lot in the early days, when it was something SEOs used to gain links or rank for content. But like I said, it has been years since I wrote about it and years since I even thought about it.
Some folks in the SEO industry wonder if now that Yahoo Answer’s content will be out of the way, will we have more room to have our content rank.
John Mueller of Google responded to that on Twitter saying “I don’t have high hopes if Yahoo answers was a serious competitor for your sites…”
I don’t have high hopes if Yahoo answers was a serious competitor for your sites… pic.twitter.com/JCTR3uVnwl
— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) April 6, 2021
How will I remember how to boil an egg? I guess Google got that covered?
In short, I doubt Yahoo Answers got convertible traffic in ages and I guess that is why they are shutting it down.
This is the email Yahoo sent out about this news:
Dear Yahoo Answers Community,
We launched Yahoo Answers sixteen years ago to help people around the world connect and share information. With you and millions of other users, we built the best place on the web to ask and answer questions on a variety of topics, creating a community of global knowledge sharing. While we could not have been prouder of what we accomplished together, we are reaching out today to let you know that we have decided to shut down Yahoo Answers on May 4th, 2021.
While Yahoo Answers war once a key part of Yahoo’s products and services, it has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed. To that end, we have decided to shift our resources away from Yahoo Answers to focus on products that better serve our members and deliver on Yahoo’s promise of providing premium trusted content.
Starting on April 20th you will no longer be able to post any new questions or answers. However, you can still view any posted questions and answers until May 4th. On May 4th the site will be shutting down. If you would like to download a copy of your questions and answers you have posted, you can do this by signing into Your Privacy Dashboard and requesting a download. You will be able to do this until June 30th, 2021 after which your Yahoo Answers data will be securely deleted and no longer available. The closure of Yahoo Answers will not affect your Yahoo account or other Yahoo services. For further information and instructions on how to download your data, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions or copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN35642.html
Thank you for contributing to Yahoo Answers — we’re proud and honored to have helped you connect with and learn from the Yahoo community these past sixteen years. If you’d like to provide feedback, please feel free to reach out to our team at yahoo_answers_sunset@verizonmedia.com.
Sincerely, The Yahoo Answers team
Here is a screenshot of the home page so we have it here (click to enlarge):
Yahoo posted an FAQ on the closure of Yahoo Answers over here.
Forum discussion at Twitter & WebmasterWorld.