Posted by Miranda.Rensch
Hello you Mozzy bunch! My name is Miranda. I’m a Program Manager here at SEOmoz. I work on defining new features and improvements to the SEOmoz PRO Web App, SEO Tools, and our website. You may have seen me commenting and participating in pie-eating contests here and there, but I’m excited to say that this is my very first SEO Blog post!
Since I started at SEOmoz five months ago, I’ve been working on a Questions and Answers forum for our PRO members. Today I am very excited to announce the launch of PRO Q&A!
Previously, PRO members have used our Expert Q&A feature to ask SEO questions to our staff and associates. As our community has grown into an incredible network of SEO and online marketing experts, we decided it was time to create a more interactive forum that would allow PRO members to become resources for one another and contribute to a growing database of quality information.
PROs can still ask the same number of private, staff-only questions per month in this new system, but now we’ve added the opportunity to utilize the knowledge of other PRO members. (If you have open questions in the old Q&A system, you can still visit them at the same URL.)
Asking Questions
In the new PRO Q&A, you can ask unlimited questions to the PRO community. We’ve done a few weeks of beta testing (thanks to our beta testers for the wonderful feedback!), and received very positive feedback about the timing and quality of responses. So jump in and ask a question!
PRO members can thumb Q&A responses up and down the same way they can on our blog, earning the author MozPoints. You can view all the questions you’ve asked or answered under My Questions in the gray sub-nav bar. You’ll receive an email when there’s a new response to a question you’ve asked. After you have a few responses, you can select up to three as "Helpful Responses".
We think you’ll get some great responses from the community, but you can still ask one private question per month to SEOmoz staff and associates (three for PRO Elite and four for PRO Premier members).
Answering Questions
Answering questions is even more fun than asking them! Why? Because you earn MozPoints for excellent answers! Each time your response gets a thumbs up, you get 1 MozPoint, and if your response gets flagged as a "Helpful Answer", you earn 3 MozPoints. If you feel the need for speed, respond to a new Q&A post within four hours of being posted and earn 3 MozPoints. If your response is SEOmoz Endorsed, meaning “We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!”, you earn 10 MozPoints!
Looking for questions to answer? You can click Open Questions to see all the questions with no responses or that have no responses marked as helpful or SEOmoz Endorsed. If you’re an expert on a certain topic, you can choose that category on the left and use the filters to show only open questions or ones with no responses.
If you see a response or reply that is incorrect, misleading, inappropriate, or just particularly hilarious, feel free to flag it as such. Our moderators always appreciate a little help. Thanks for helping us keep our PRO Q&A friendly and helpful!
We get to play too!
You’ll see SEOmoz staff and associates are still actively involved in answering and endorsing questions. We may even ask a few of our own now and then!
Free members: don’t feel left out!
There’s something here for you, too! While free members can’t ask or answer questions, you can see question threads that are older than two weeks. Also, if a free member gains over 500 MozPoints, they are considered for full access to the PRO Q&A where they can ask and answer questions, gain points for great responses, and see all the latest content. Time to get working on that killer YOUmoz post!
We Love Feedback
While our beta testers did an excellent job of letting us know of ways to improve the new PRO Q&A system, we can always use more comments and ideas on how to make it better. Please feel free to send in feedback using the feedback tab on the left side of page.
PS – You’ll see that the new Q&A has a different navigation than the navigation on the rest of the site. For a few days, you will only see this when accessing the new Q&A. Do not be alarmed. Consider it a sneak peek of what’s to come!
