Quite often I get a question what TLD is preferable for the Russian market – .RU or .РФ, to which I always reply dot RU, of course. РФ domains, despite a good take off, when they were introduced back in 2010, never managed to become a good alternative to .RU. A lot of individuals and companies purchased domains when they become available, but very few made good use of them.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, there are very few actual sites on .РФ domains as they did not prove to be useful neither for Yandex SEO nor for businesses. According to statdom.ru (which is the absolute best resource for any kind of information about Russian domain names, by the way), only around 30% of all .RF domains are used for actual sites, and the rest are parked, redirected or return an error.

What’s interesting is that when it comes to .RU domains, 56% of them are in use and only 9,4% are parked. The numbers speak for themselves.

Another interesting fact is that a lot of owners skip renewing their .РФ. On January 1st there were 938 121, but on January 15 the number shrank to 911 922. This means that about 27 000 .РФ domains got canceled in the first 2 weeks of 2012! The cancellation rate had been increasing throughout last year, and according to some analysts (in Russian), if it continues this way, the number of registered .RF domains will shrink by 250 000 by the end of March.

During 2011 Yandex lost 4% of searches in Russia to Google.ru, reports Vedomosti (in Russian). I heard mentions of this fact throughout last year, but here is how it looks in absolute numbers.

According to LiveInternet statistics, in December last year search market in Russia was divided between Yandex, Google.ru and other smaller search engines as shown below:

In December 2010 Yandex held 64,1% of the search market, and Google – 21,5%. Quite a big change in one year, isn’t it?

Analysts say that Google’s market share most likely increases not due to the search engine traffic itself, but because of other platform Google owns or has partnerships with. Presumably, the majority of growth  can be explained by wide use of Android devices (where search is powered by Google), social network Google+ as well as popularity of Chrome browser, which Google has been advertising on TV in Russia since half a year!

I have to mention, however, than Yandex also works with various partners and web browsers. Facebook search in Russia is, for example, powered by Yandex. Same goes for Windows Phone 7 and Firefox, among others. Needless to say that Aport and Rambler use Yandex’s search engine, and that Bing’s ads in Russia are in reality Yandex Direct.

Just like I predicted earlier, Yandex now announced a strong focus on mobile technologies in 2012, and not only on advertising. They acquired a mobile development company SPB Software, and, I suspect, is going to work on a response to Android – their own mobile OS.

A spokesman of Yandex told Vedomosti that the company expects 58-60% growth in revenue in 2012 and not focusing on increasing their market share, but rather creating new and useful products. The next big release, for example, is supposed to be a new search platform, which better understands interests and preferences of Internet users (read: personalized search).

Yesterday I read something, as I thought at first, totally ridiculous, but it seems to be happening for real. In Belarus from today it is forbidden to provide any kind of services or sell any kind of goods on the Internet from a website with any other top level domain than .BY.

Cnews.ru reports that according to the new law companies and individuals will be administratively punished for doing business with foreign sites. Even Internet cafes providing access to forbidden sites will be forced to pay fines. The fine for violating this law will be up to 30 “units”, which is currently 1,05 million Belarusian rubles, which is approximately 120 USD.

Interestingly, Belarusian citizens will not be charged for accessing foreign websites. I guess the government believes that the people of Belarus will abide the law and stop using beloved vkontakte.ru, Twitter and Facebook right away? What about watching YouTube videos? Nope! Send an email from @mil.ru? Nope! Seriously, how is this possible in 21st century?!

Belarusian Internet in numbers

Belarus is not a big country. It’s population is only 9 million people (compare with the Ukraine – 46 mln, Russia – 142 mln). Belarusian Internet (so-called ByNet) can be described with the number*s below:

3 500 000: Internet users

43 000: registered .BY domains (on 28.12.2011)

Up to 94%: percentage of traffic, generated by Belarusian users, routed to Russian web resources

$6 100 000: value of Belarusian online advertising market in 2010

18 000: registered Twitter accounts belong to users from Belarus

80 000: Belarusian blogs in LiveJournal

18,3%: of Belarusian population have access to broadband Internet

150-200 000 000: cases of law violation will have to be registered daily, because this is how much traffic is routed from Belarus to foreign websites every day.

Combining this with very low buying ability, is the market attractive enough to even bother creating Twitter.by or LiveJournal.by? Or will Belarusians be limited to browsing their 43 000 .by domains?

So what happens now?

The purpose of the law if, I suppose, is to attract more money into the country. Instead of buying products from abroad, Belarusians are now supposed to buy from the same Russian or European companies, but only those with physical offices inside the country. By this, money stays in the country -> Good for the economy. Will it work? I am not an economist and I won’t judge.

The officials of Belarus, after massive press pick up of these news, clarified: they do not restrict access to foreign resources for Belarusian citizens. Nether they forbid the citizens sell their goods and services on foreign resources. The restrictions apply to businesses operating on Belarusian territory via foreign sites. And that means what? Will an affiliate selling leads to Amazon.com be punished? Will ISP selling Internet access to this affiliate be punished?

These news gave me a strange feeling. We used to be one country, and now, at the same time as Russia becomes the largest Internet market in Europe and takes pride for it, this kind of laws emerge in Belarus. Of course, the access is not restricted for citizens, but where is a guarantee that mail.ru and Odnoklassniki, Facebook and Twitter won’t pull out from the country?

* Data sources for statistics: InterFax Belarus, MobWiki.ru

Russian Internet is developing astonishingly fast! 2011 was a great year full of important events and big changes. Russia became the fastest growing online advertising market in Europe. But even the key players, like Yandex, underestimated the tempo Russian Internet usage grew in 2011!

In his latest presentation at SES San-Francisco (August 2011) Preston Carey, Yandex Business Developer in the US & Europe, presented a forecast that suggested that Russian Internet audience will reach 80 million users by 2014:

Now, it appears, the number of Internet users in Russia reached 70 million already by the end of last year, according to the Russian Ministry of Communications.

This makes Russia the largest online market in Europe leaving the former leader, Germany, behind with its 66 million Internet users.

The Ministry of Communications is very optimistic about this development. They expect the number of Internet users in Russia to reach 90 million by 2014.

In July 2011 Yandex reported that Russian-speaking audience of Twitter crossed 1 million mark. Today Yandex’s Twitter user rating includes 1,68 million accounts. This is over 50% growth in the last 6 month!

Vedomosti.ru, one of the major Russian newspapers, writes that a lot of this growth happened during Russian Parliament elections time in December 2011 and that some of Cyrillic terms such as “выборы” (elections), “Путин” (Putin) made it into worldwide trending topics. Many argue though that thousands of Twitter accounts were created during- and after-elections period to tone down the protests, which might have contribute into the growth figure.

November 23, 2011: just before a series of SEO conferences and events across the Russian speaking space Yandex released yet another version of ranking formula. For now it only affects “commercially oriented queries” (read SERPs for e-commerce sites) in Moscow region, but seeing the past developments with Google I believe I can make some bold assumptions about where Yandex is heading.

New Ranking Formula for e-commerce websites

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, Yandex claims to understand and use site usability as a ranking signal. The new ranking formula takes it even further. According to their official statement (in Russian), the new ranking signals that are added are:

Trust towards the company’s website: well-known brand, contact information, customer reviews.

Design and usability: quality descriptions and images, product search, ratings, customer reviews, simple registration form.

Broad assortment: good selection of products.

Price: prices have to be set at a “fair” level.

Payment and delivery options: several payment options, various delivery options as well as “quick and cheap” delivery.

The new ranking algorithm was explained further at Optimization.ru SEO conference by Alexander Sadovskiy, who is sort of Matt Cutts of Yandex.

Alexander Sadovskiy at Optimization.ru (image credit to SearchEngines.ru)

Sadovskiy said both online and offline components are important for “trust” from a user point of view.  Yandex tries to give the users the result they are searching for, and therefore both online and offline factors will matter for site evalutation. The following elements of a website are considered to be an indication of a serious retail store:

- Redirect to https when processing payments

- Corporate email (not free mail service provider)

- Landline telephone number, or better several

- Office addresses with specified opening hours, directions to the offices’ location

- Easy access to product pages (within 2 clicks)

- Absence of intrusive advertisement

- Valid HTML code

- Good quality content

Some of these things are quite straightforward and obviously aiming against low quality and non-secure e-commerce sites to improve search quality. But to me it feels like Yandex is doing the same thing as Google did not so long ago.

Implications of the new algorithm for Yandex SEO for e-commerce sites

I find these new requirements mainly good for overall search quality. Great to hear that dodgy and phishing sites will not rank as easily and online shopping in Russia will be more secure.

I also some trends similar to Google’s previous changes:

1. Better rankings for strong brands.

The last couple of years Google obviously favors strong brands in its search results. It seems to me that Yandex starts doing exactly the same thing. It is already very difficult to rank new sites. Now I believe it will be more difficult to rank sites of small and medium size businesses, affiliate sites and any other kind of businesses that solely rely on SEO.

Among other reasons, search engines push brands in their search results, because they are more “trusted” by general audience and are less likely to do shady things when it comes to both selling products and SEO. This change will also force a lot of companies to buy Yandex.Direct ads after losing SEO traffic due to this algorithm change.

2. Importance of user-generated content.

The importance of user-generated content is not new to Yandex. Although it was not officially stated anywhere, I saw a positive effect of having corporate blogs and forums on indexing speed and overall rankings in some verticals. Now customer reviews will be a powerful ranking signal for e-commerce sites.

3. Importance of Yandex Market.

After following the Russian SEO conferences in held November-December this year, it seems that customer reviews from Yandex Market* will be regarded as an SEO ranking signal.

* Yandex Market is an analog of Google Shopping. It works practically the same way, apart from the fact that clicks are not free.

This new part of Yandex ranking algorithm will eventually attract more e-com sites into Yandex Market. Again, looks like it’s better for the user and at the same time Yandex benefits from it, financially.

Another thing that tells me that Market will play a more important role in Yandex SEO is that the new ranking formula includes “fair” product prices. It is, of course possible, that Yandex will index and compare all prices across all stores and product lines, but to me it seems more likely that the judgment of “fairness” of the price will be based on the data Yandex receives from the retailers advertizing on Yandex Market.

 Yandex SEO in 2012

I believe that Yandex SEO as we know it today, will not exist by the end of 2012. SEO for Yandex is becoming very complex.

It won’t be enough to write an optimized copy and buy a few links on SAPE. SEO specialist has to think about customer’s needs to create the right type of content, understand customer’s preferences and surfing patterns to improve behavioral metrics.

To successfully rank in Yandex in 2012 it will be necessary to build quality sites, work on user interface and usability, create brand awareness and have a strong presence in social media. Basically, working with Yandex SEO is becoming very similar to working with SEO for Google.com.

I also believe that SEO for Yandex will become more integrated into companies’ marketing and there will be more interdependency between SEO, PPC, PR and Social.

In one of my recent posts I mentioned that Mail.ru Group was preparing to challenge one of the world’s largest social media services Twitter in Russia and launch their own microblogging service. It appears we will see the Russian Twitter-killer earlier than I imagined.

According to the statement made by Mail.ru spokesman, the new service will be called Futubra.com (not .RU, mind it!) and will be launched already in January 2012. The product seems to be a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. Apart from normal “tweets”. Futubra’s users will be able to share pictures and video, create events and groups. Just like in case of Twitter (and recently Facebook), Futubra will allow its users to subscribe for other people feeds without becoming “friends”.

While mobile Internet in Russia is not exactly widely used (only 4% of all Internet traffic in Russia is generated through mobile devices, reports comScore), Futubra team plans to create apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and Symbian at the same time as the web-based service.

Today Twitter has over 1 million Russian users. Whether Futubra will manage to take over a chunk of this audience or create even a bigger one, remains to be seen. Integration with Mail.ru Group owned social networks Odnoklassniki.ru and Moi Mir will definitely help to boost the numbers.

Just a few weeks ago I wrote a post about non-importance of social signals in Yandex SEO. I also concluded my analysis with a thought that sooner or later Yandex will incorporate social into their algorithm, because everything points in that direction.

Last week Yandex made yet another move showing that they do not ignore the importance of presence in social media: they started to show links to social media profiles in page snippets:

Links to social profiles in snippets (Yandex)

According to the first observations, the links to social profiles appear only in snippets for homepages and display links only to profiles on Facebook, vKontakte, Twitter and LiveJournal. In order to get these links in your snippet, the social profiles need to be linked from your website.

Yandex spokesman told SearchEnglies.ru that social profiles are becoming an important part of any company, therefore Yandex will be displaying links to various social media sites to give their users the most complete information about a product/company.

Currently snippets with social medial links are only available for certain verticals (gifts and travel among others), but Yandex promised to add them to a larger variety of sites in the nearest future.

The latest gossip in Russian Internet circles is that the next step for Yandex after their NASDAQ IPO, successful launch in Turkey and recent partnership with Czech leading search engine Seznam is to launch in Poland. Rumors say that Yandex has already hired a business developer in Poland, with a very impressive track record including companies like Dell and Apple.

Polish Internet audience is estimated to be around 40 million people, where Google holds 97% market share. Entering a market with such strong Google presence might sounds like a strange idea, especially given 2 facts from the recent past:

1. Yandex already made an attempt to enter Polish market back in 2001, but pulled off due to the crisis in .com industry as well as uncertain state of Polish economy.

2. The announcement of international expansion plans Yandex made in summer was very much about entering markets where Google does not have a strong dominant position. The first of these markets was Turkey. Yandex also mentioned Vietnam, Indonesia and Egypt.

So why Poland?

The rumors about Yandex planning an acquisition of Onet.pl (one of the biggest portals in Poland) were circulating in the tech press since summer 2011 (see, for example, Bloomberg report from July). Purchasing of the other major portal Wp.pl also gets mentioned here and there.

Both portals have look and feel of Yahoo!, i.e. publish a lot of categorized content and at the same time have search. Onet.pl search box is currently powered by Google; wp.pl has its own search engine.

In case of this purchase, Yandex will actually claim a big chunk of Polish market right away:

I never really focused on writing about Meta tags for Yandex in this blog, mainly because it seemed just too obvious to me. Now, however, Yandex has implemented a change, which is totally worth mentioning!

Which Meta tags matter in Yandex SEO

We all know that Google and Bing do not pay attention to Meta keywords and Meta description tags, while Meta description is still very important for catching searcher’s attention in busy SERPs. Yandex however never, from what I know, made any public statements with regards to these tags.

In Yandex Webmaster Help they state the following:

Yandex robot takes into account the content of the following tags:

<Meta name=”Keywords” content=”…”/> — may be taken into account when the robot determines if a page matches a search query;
<Meta name=”Description” content=”…”/> — contents of this tag may be used in snippets (site descriptions that appear on the search result page);

Seeing this one can assume that Meta keywords and Meta description play a role in Yandex SEO, but how important are they?

Yandex and Title tag

It is a must to have a well-written title containing keywords. Yandex uses title tags in their ranking algorithm. Very important part of your on-site optimization strategy.

Yandex and Meta Description Tag

The influence of Meta description tag on site rankings is quite unclear. Very often Yandex prefers making up its own snippets instead of the Meta description you specify. From my personal observation, well-written Meta description summarizing the page and containing main keywords has a good chance to appear as a snippet in search listings and therefore should not be ignored. Just like with Google, treat it as a field where you communicate the benefits of visiting your page.

Put time into writing good Meta descriptions for your pages. This probably won’t directly affect your rankings, but can help to increase CTR. Mind that behavioral factors are a part of Yandex ranking formula, so obviously higher CTR = better behavioral factor = better position!

Yandex and Meta Keywords tag

Same as with Meta description tag, I never noticed strong correlation between including Meta keywords and improving rankings on Yandex. If you analyze a SERP for any search term, I bet you will find all sorts of approaches to Meta keywords from stuffing it with all possible keywords to completely ignoring them.

I recommend to optimize Meta keywords, just to indicate that the page is relevant, and will do so as long as Yandex does not confirm that it ignores Meta keywords the same way Google does.

The change

As Yandex reported earlier this week, they changed their approach to creating page snippets. Before snippet headlines were selected based on what was included in the title tag. Now, if Yandex finds the information in your Title tag irrelevant (i.e. not containing the keywords relevant to the search query) the snippet will be constructed from Meta description and headings or other parts of text copy on the landing page.

This announcement received very mixed reactions from the Russian SEO community. According to one of the industry experts interviewed by SearchEngines.ru, most of the new snippets look pretty good, however for long tail queries they often make very little sense.

This change is very important as it directly affects one of the few means we’ve got for improving behavioral factors. The only tip here is to write good Titles and Meta description for all pages and constantly monitor what shows up in your snippets.