In April Yandex launched a new algorithm known as Arzamas these days (Arzamas is a name of a Russian city btw). Apart from many new factors affecting rankings, such as for example duplicate content filter that removed over one million of pages from the index in one night, in the new algorithm was implemented a new geotargeting feature.

Even before it was possible to search among websites that belonged to a specific region by selecting the region manually in advanced search options. Arzamas went further. Arzamas assigns websites to a specific region automatically. How? Haha.. we wish we knew =) Sometimes it gets it all wrong…

The known factors defining a region your site is attached to are:

- location-by-IP data
- domain names
- content-related features: ZIP and area codes on your contact page
- region you assign to the site yourself when registering it in Yandex Directory

Some people speculate that origin of your backlinks has an impact, i.e. if sites from, say, Vladivostok link to you that means your site is also from Vladivostok.

You can easily find out the region a site assigned to with the help of Yandex bar. Just hover over the Quotation Index indicator. Three possible options are available:

Region – Russia. This means the site will rank the same all over the country

Yandex bar: region Russia

Region – unknown. Here it is hard to predict how this will affect your cross-regional rankings. From my experience, you can still see differences among regional SERPs for smaller sites.

Yandex bar: region unknown

Region – (city/ region name). This means your site will rank better in that particular region.

Yandex bar: region assigned

Yandex provides a tool for comparison of regional SERPs: http://webmaster.yandex.ru/wmconsole/compare_regions.xml. Please try it out. The results can surprise you =P

Right now regional SERPs fully function for Moscow and St. Petersburg from what is known officially. Algorithms for the other regions of Russia are to be released later. Yandex claimed that the goal is to distinguish between 50 regions at least.

Please note that when searching in Yandex from Europe/ US the SEPRs are completely messed up. I highly recommend to use a Russian proxy when checking rankings.

And the last note for this post. Today Yandex released a beta version of Arzamas 1.1, which you can test here: http://buki.yandex.ru/. This new algorithm will be used for all Russian regions excluding Moscow, St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg. Apparently if you add &lr=* (* is a code of your region) while searching in this beta version, you can see your regional SERPs. By adding &lr=225 Yandex eta will show SERPs for region “Russia”.

A quick note: Yandex does not recognize attribute ”nofollow”, i.e. if you nofollow your links, Yandex will still see and index them. Instead of nofollow attribute Yandex SEO use tag “noindex”:

noindex tag in html code

This is very important to keep in mind that most of the SEO tools we use look for nofollowed links and do not underline or highlight the noindexed ones in any way.

The basics:

When creating keyword lists for your American, German or French sites, you turn to Google for keyword suggestions. But what do you do in Russia?

Google is not very good with Russian semantics, besides the amount of searchers in Google.ru is not that high. Is Google.ru keyword data reliable? Who is using Google? Can it help to find good keywords to get traffic from Yandex? Well well.. Google keyword suggestion tool is good, however I recommend to use Yandex Keyword tool as a primary source of ideas.

Yandex keyword tool, also known as Wordstat, gives related to your term keywords and monthly search volumes (I presume it is what we know as “broad match” in Google). Unfortunately you cannot enter several keyword phrases at once, so the process of generating keyword list will take a while.

Wordstat - keyword tool of Yandex

Another nice feature of Wordstat is trended search volume data. Yandex shows search trends for specific keywords on weekly and monthly basis.

Wordstat search trends

Speaking about trends I would like to mention another search trend visualization tool “Yandex Interests”. It is a somewhat simplified copy of Google Insights. It shows search trends only for 50 most searched terms in a given months. Kind of useless, but can be fun to play with.

Alternative sources of keyword data:

I really love the SEO Rate service, developed by one of the Russian companies. SEO Rate analyzes visibility of websites across 5 Russian search engines (Yandex, Google, Rambler, Aport and Live) and popularity of search queries.

All sites and queries are divided into 50+ categories. Pick the one you are interested in, look at the top 20 sites related to your topic, analyze their keywords!

Sites with best visibility in "SEO" category

The most searched queries are also interesting to look at, however the categories are quite broad so you will have to filter the keywords extracted from there.

How to switch to "Keyword" mode in SEO Rate

Yandex search suggest:

Yandex search suggestions

Yandex search suggestions are used by approximately 50% of searchers, therefore it is important to monitor those. However, do not rush to optimize your pages for keywords, which you find in search suggestions. The suggestions tend to change rather often.

Now go and try out the tools!

To be continued…

This is the first post of the series “10+ things to know before you start”.  I decided to create this category because although Yandex works in a similar way to Google, there are several Yandex-specific factors, which you must consider when doing your Yandex SEO.

Quotation index is one of them.

Quotation index is a grade of importance given by Yandex to your website (similar to Google’s PR). It does not affect your rankings, but shows how trusted your site is from Yandex point of view.

The scale of quotation index is very broad. It can vary from 0 to 150 000 =) And there is no correlation with Google PR whatsoever. Good private sites usually have quotation index from 150 till 1000, major newspapers and TV channels’ sites – between 1000 and 10 000.

The easiest way to see quotation index is to install Yandex toolbar (IE: http://bar.yandex.ru/ie/, Firefox: http://bar.yandex.ru/firefox/). The yellow bars show the value of quotation index:

Yandex tool bar

There are several known for sure factors that affect quotation index:

• Number of backlinks of your site
• Trust level of your backlinks (comes with age, good directories listings, backlinks etc.)
• Relevancy of your backlinks (e.g. if you sell refrigerators and get backlinks from flower delivery sites, it will not help to boos your quotation index.. not much, anyway)
• Quotation index of your backlinks
• Quality of your content
• Number and trustworthiness of your external links
• Number of internal links
• Patterns of your link building
• Patterns of your linking to external sources
• Geographic location of your backlinks
• Date of registration in the Yandex directory

These are the factors you have to look at when looking for websites to get links from.

Some additional points to remember:

• High PR does not automatically mean high quotation index and vice versa, however strong trusted sites usually have good parameters in both Google and Yandex!
• Both PR and quotation index can be rather easily artificially inflated. Look for trusted sites rather than for sites with high Google and Yandex parameters!

To be continued…