All search engines, including Yandex, tell you to create great content. They also tell you that the content should be unique. But what if your content gets re-posted somewhere, and what if that copy-paster ranks higher than you? This situation, I am sure, is familiar to most of us.

Search engines have been pretty good at determining the primary source of content, but sometimes they do get it wrong, and Yandex does more often than Google.

In 2011 Google came up with a way for authors to protect their rights in the SERPs with rel=”author” tag. It has proven to be a very good way to show Google the true ownership of the content as well as build up authority of you as a writer. Unfortunately, Yandex does not support rel=”author” tag. But there is an alternative.

Original Texts tool in Yandex Webmaster

Yandex gives a possibility to claim your content authorship by submitting the texts through a form in Yandex Webmaster tools before publishing them on the site.

The form is placed in Site content section in Webmaster Tools. The section is not translated into English for some reason, but the Original Texts tool can still be accessed from the first item in the list or by following this link http://webmaster.yandex.ru/site/ext_plugins.xml?wizard=api.originals.

In order for the tool to work for you, you need to make sure:

- Your site has a TIC of 10 or higher.

- You content is not shorter than 2000 characters and not longer than 32ooo characters.

- Your content is unique and cannot be found anywhere on the Internet.

- You submit plain text without HTML code.

Although Original Texts tool does not give a 100% guarantee that copied text will not over-rank your original one, in most case it will help Yandex to identify you as an author of the content.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Over last year we’ve seen a lot of changes in Yandex search algorithm, which of course affected SEO. Increased emphasis on quality of content, site usability and behavioral factors with personalized search on top of that brought Yandex SEO quality standards close to those of Google.com.

Unlike a year ago, severe penalties can be caused by low quality, keyword-stuffed or duplicate content. Keyword research, onsite SEO and link building process have become more sophisticated.

Yandex SEO DON’Ts

Duplicate, keyword-stuffed, auto-generated, and machine translated content

For us, international SEOs, it is very important to understand that Yandex SEO success requires investing time and effort into creating high quality content written in good Russian language.

A lot of international sites fail to do so, ending up with machine-translated or poorly written Russian copy that drags them down in Yandex SERPs.

Penalties for low quality content have become more severe over the last couple of years. I have seen sections or even whole websites thrown out from Yandex search index.

Excessive advertising

Yandex is striving to provide their users with best possible search results. While many people in Russia claim that Yandex search results are too commercial, what you seldom see in Yandex Top 10 is spammy sites overloaded with AdSense or Yandex.Direct ads.
During the years, there were at least 2 modifications made in Yandex search algorithm that aimed against sites using pop-ups, pop-unders and other kinds of “irritating” advertising.

Automated link buying

There are plenty of Russian SEO tools that can take care of your link building without you spending too much time on it – from threatened by Matt Cutts SAPE to sophisticated systems that can be configured in different ways to suit your SEO demands.
Sorry to say guys, the days of winning by spamming are coming to an end. Links placed in obscure places of randomly selected websites, most of which are created solely for selling links, do not work as well as they used to before.

Obsessing with rankings

SERP rankings in Yandex could be misleading metric since the arrival of regional-specific search back in 2009, and even more so after the launch of the latest Yandex search algorithm with personalized search.

Regional rankings can be tricky to monitor with rank-checking tools as the positions vary greatly in different Russian cities based on regional settings of the site and the type of keywords it is targeting. It is difficult to find regional Russian proxies, and manual check through Yandex.Webmaster can be very tiresome.

Since December 2012, when Yandex rolled out personalized search, SERP rankings almost became a thing of the past. Search results are different for 75-80% of all search queries, and all users are opted in regardless of whether they are logged in into their Yandex account or not.

Focus on small list of keywords

Due to personalization of the search results, it is a risky strategy to base Yandex SEO effort on small list of “important” keywords assigned to a few “important” pages.

It is very difficult to say how relevant people find your page to a particular (usually quite general) query. In case a significant percentage of people do not find the page relevant, the probability you site won’t show up for them in top 10 is very high, and there is no way for you to know what their SERPs look like.

Yandex SEO DOs

Continuous work with usability, design and conversion

Usability, design and conversion became a vital part of Yandex SEO success from the day when behavioral factors were incorporated into Yandex search algorithm. Now, with the personalization of search, they way your visitors interact with your site is even more important. The less they bounce and the longer the stay – the better and more relevant your site will seem to Yandex.

Working with site snippets

Snippets are very important for Yandex SEO for the same reason as user experience – they are the first impression of your website and they influence behavioural factors. Moreover, personalized search algorithm stops displaying sites with low CTR from the SERPs or lower them in the search results, as they do not seem interesting to the users.

Make sure title and description tags are well written; utilize rich snippets possibilities when possible.

Broad keyword portfolio

Successful SEO strategy for Yandex in 2013 will be based on a keyword portfolio. Instead of focusing on a handful of keywords, create content around them using different combinations and synonyms. Try to give relevant answers to the questions your potential customers might have about the product / service you are promoting.

Creating unique and useful for the reader content

The content you place on your site should be interesting, engaging and look appealing to the users. Use images, interactive elements, and format text in a way that is easy to read.

It is not enough to only create good content anymore. Presentation is also important. Always keep in mind that user behaviour on your page is an important ranking factor for Yandex.

Building links naturally (or at least carefully)

Link building for Yandex has been ugly for years. For most site owners SEO involved using services for submitting sites to hundreds of directories, spamming social bookmaking sites and buying large chunks of links through Russian link brokers.
These days link building tactics for Yandex changed. I am not saying that paid links do not work anymore. They do. And SAPE is more alive than ever. I do say however that spammy links with exact keywords in anchor texts located in obscure areas will not give the desired effect in 2013.

Most links in Russia remain paid. The selection of placements for links however should be a careful process. Yandex likes links from:

- relevant, on-topic sites
- trusted directories (e.g. Yandex.Catalog, DMOZ etc.)
- news sites (preferably listed in Yandex.News and Google News)
- popular on-topic blogs with a real reader base

I believe the links from sites that don’t participate in SAPE or similar give better effect. Although link brokers might seem like a shortcut and a time-saver, I do recommend to refrain from relying on those.

My general feeling is that in 2013 all of us, who work with Yandex SEO, should take another look at the sites we deal with. For years, the optimization and link building were the focus. Now the 3rd element – user behavior – has come in and strongly positioned itself in the algorithm of the search engine. Even if you are ranking high enough, work on the UX, try to get them to stay on your site and Yandex will give you some extra love.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Yandex as a search engine was created 16 years ago, back in 1997, and became a brand in 2000. A lot has changed during the years, both for users and for SEOs. Let’s have a look at the evolution of Yandex search algorithm.

There are no records or announcements about Yandex ranking formula dated earlier than 2007. 2007 was the year when Yandex started actively working with their search algorithm and communicate the changes to the community. Ever since, every new ranking formula was named after a city in Russia, and the logic behind naming them is taken from an old Russian game called “cities”: each newly introduced formula’s name starts from the last letter of the previous formula’s name:

Magadan -> Nakhodka -> Arzamas -> Snezhinsk -> Konakovo -> Obninsk -> Krasnodar -> Reykjavik -> Kaliningrad. On the map this journey would look like this:

Let’s look a what this journey looked like for Russian SEO.

Magadan (April 2008)

The search algorithm Magadan was a revolution. It had at least twice as many ranking factors as the previous one, where uniqueness of site content received quite an important role.

Yandex learned to understand transliteration (spelling Russian words with Latin characters – for instance, in URLs), commonly used abbreviations, and rank documents based on this knowledge.

Another interesting feature was that Yandex started to better understand text and to rank relevant documents even if they did not contain exact keyword combinations.

Magadan was also the algorithm that started indexing and ranking websites in English.

Nakhodka (September 2008)

Nakhodka came half a year later. At that point Yandex learned to understand the meaning of stop-words (prepositions, conjunctions etc.) and use them for ranking documents.

Thesaurus of the search engine was expanded, which lead to to better understanding and ranking of synonyms and spelling variations.

Arzamas (April 2009)

Arzamas was the algorithm that brought real local search to Yandex. It was based on classification of all search queries into two types: geo-dependant and geo-indepenant. For geo-depenant queries the local businesses received priority in local SERPs (e.g. a Novosibirsk taxi company site would rank better in Novosibirsk than a site of a taxi company from Moscow).

Additionally, Arzamas was the first ranking algorithm that went hard on pages with pop-up and pop-under advertising.

Snezhinsk (November 2009)

In Snezhinks Yandex introduced several thousands new ranking factors, which provoked somewhat of a panic in the Russian SEO community. The main changes I noted were:

- Trusted sites (brands) got generally higher positions in search results

- Unique content because a must, and sites with duplicate content got punished

- Old links became more valuable than newly acquired ones

- New type of penalty for low quality sites – AGS – was introduced

All these changes made it more difficult and time-consuming for new sites to get first page of Yandex search results.

From a technology perspective, MatrixNet (self-learning engine) was launched.

All these changes took Yandex SEO to a new level, where quality of SEO work became more important than quantity of links.

Konakovo (December 2009)

Local search algorithm, introduced initially for 19 regions in Russia with the launch of Arzamas, was extended to 1250 cities throughout the country.

Obninsk (September 2010)

The main difference of that Obninsk brought to Yandex SEO was devaluing a large amount of “SEO links” (paid links).

Other changes in the algorithm included changes to ranking formula for geo-independant search queries and better way of identifying the initial source of content on case of duplication.

Krasnodar (December 2010)

Krasnodar algorithm incorporated another intelligent technology – Spectrum – the goal of which was to understand user’s search intent and serve better search results for words with more than one meaning or search queries that are too generic.

Reykjavik (August 2011)

Reykjavik was the next step towards understanding the user’s search intent. This algorithm learned to identify language preferences of a user, and depending on that, display more or fewer search results in English.

The algorithm mainly concerned searches in foreign languages, hence named after a foreign city.

Kaliningrad (December 2012)

Kaliningrad brought personalized search to Yandex users.

According to the company’s announcement 75-80% of all search results became personalized for everyone, regardless of whether the user is logged in or not (unlike Google’s personalization).

Yandex claims that the audience responded better to the personalized results, while SEOs have to once again learn ow to adjust to the new environment.

Looking back, Yandex has come up with a new significant change in their search algorithm at least one per year, and sometimes twice. What will be the next one? All we can say right now is that probably the name will start with a D.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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For a while I’ve been wondering, and I guess some of you did too, if there is a good competitive intelligence tool for Yandex? Recently I found one, which works well, and I would like to share my findings with you. The tool is called SpyWords.

I used it a lot in the last couple of month, and since it did a good job and saved a lot of time for me, I thought I give them a credit and review them on my blog.

Features

To start with, SpyWords is very similar (but simpler) to SEMRush, which is a well-known competitive intelligence tool for Google and Bing.

Basically, SpyWords has three main features that can be used for various purposes. The interface is very straightforward, and although the tool does not have as many reporting options as SEMRush, it can provide useful insights into verticals, SEO and SEM competitors, and be a great help in researching keywords.

Competitive intelligence for Yandex and Google

This feature gives an overview of a specific competitor in Yandex (paid and organic) or Google (paid and organic) as well as competitiveness of a specific keyword in Yandex and Google.

Entering keyword in the search field will give you the following information:

PPC (Yandex Direct & Google AdWords)

- Number of impressions for the keyword in Yandex and Google

- Average CPC for the keyword in Yandex and Google

- Number of advertisers bidding on the keyword in Yandex and Google

- Names of the competitors bidding on the keywords and their text ads

- Other relevant keywords that are purchased on Yandex and Google together with the keyword, their search volumes, competitiveness and average CPC

SEO (Yandex and Google)

- Top 50 domains competing for the keyword in organic search, their ranking URLs and snippets

- Total number of organic keywords each competitor ranks top 50

Analyzing one specific competitor is even more interesting. Entering a specific domain in the search field will provide you with the following insights:

PPC (Yandex Direct & Google AdWords)

- Number of keywords the competitor is buying in Yandex and Google AdWords

- Average position of competitor’s ads in Yandex Direct and Google AdWords

- Approximate daily budget in Yandex Direct and Google AdWords

- Approximate daily traffic from Yandex Direct and Google AdWords

- Keywords purchased by the competitor on Yandex and Google, ad texts, average positions, monthly impressions, competitiveness and average CPC

- All competitor’s ads in Yandex Direct and AdWords, landing page URLs and number of keywords assigned to each ad (especially relevant for Yandex direct)

- Main competitors of the analyzed domain in paid search

SEO (Yandex and Google)

- All keywords the competitor ranks for in Google and Yandex, position for each keyword, average monthly impressions, ranking URLs and snippets

- Main competitors of the analyzed domain in organic search (based on the amount of common keywords they rank for)

Domain comparison

This feature compares organic and paid search for up to 3 domains. Let’s say, for instance, we are working for Hotels.com, and trying to evaluate our competitor booking.com. Entering both domains into the search fields gives a snapshot comparison table that displays the following metrics for both domains:

- Numbers of keywords in paid search

- Average position in paid search

- Number of keywords in organic search

- Approximate daily SEM budget

- Number of paid visits per day

- Number of organic visits per day

The amount of keywords on paid and organic search can be also visualized as diagrams:

You can find out they keywords hotels.com and booking.com have / don’t have in common by clicking on the corresponding part of the diagram.

Keyword research

The last tab, the keyword tool, is mainly good for expanding ad groups and finding PPC keyword ideas with lower competition or lower CPC. Entering a keyword into the search box in the keyword tool tab will give the following information:

- Keyword suggestions

- Search volumes in Yandex and Google

- CPC for each keyword suggestions in Yandex and Google

- Numbers of competitors for each keyword suggestion in Yandex and Google

Based on the input from this tab, it is very easy to optimize the cost of PPC campaigns on AdWords and Yandex.Direct or simply find some gems to add to your keyword portfolio:

Overall, I really love SpyWords. Even though it does not have that many fancy features and reporting options, in most cases it provides you with sufficient information for making decisions. There are, of course, some highlights and lowlights, like with any tool.

Pros

- Price. The service only costs 1000 RUB (approx. 33 USD) per month.

- Very simple and intuitive interface.

- Quite reliable data.

- Saves a lot of time when analyzing verticals, competitors, or looking for keyword ideas.

Cons

- Interface is only in Russian.

- Difficult to purchase the tool from outside CIS due to limited payment options.

- When trying to open export files, the Cyrillic texts sometimes appears scrambled due to encoding issues.

Bonus tips

1. If you do not have any of the Russian e-currencies accounts or a credit card issued in CIS or any of these random countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Macedonia, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Philippines, or Montenegro, the most straightforward way to pay to purchase the tool is Yandex.Money. This payment system allows opening accounts from any part of the world.

2. If the content appears scrambled when opening the .csv export files, upload it to Google Drive and open it as a Google spreadsheet. Google is able to interpret Cyrillic symbols correctly.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with SpyWords in any way. I think the service is great and helpful for Russian SEO work, hence this post.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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The end of the year, and here we go again! Another big change in Yandex search algorithm. This was expected; Yandex tends to do big algorithm updates in the end of each year. Last year there were two big changes in Yandex search algorithm: in October, when ad-heavy pages were lowered in the search results, and in November, when the ranking formula for e-commerce sites was modified.

2012 brought yet another big, but not exactly unexpected change: with the new search algorithm “Kaliningrad” 70-80% of Yandex search results became personalized. Western SEOs used to working with Google are very much familiar with SERP personalization, but in the Russian SEO community this change steered a lot of discussions – from “SEO is dead” to “SEO is finally becoming more civilized”.

Time will tell how the new search algorithm will affect Russian SEO industry. For now, let’s have a look at what exactly has changed.

Known facts about Yandex personalized search

- 75-80% of SERPs are now personalized.

- According to Yandex, personalized search saves 14% of time spent by users looking for information.

- 30% of the time people are looking for websites they know from before.

- 10 searches and 20 clicks on search results is enough for Yandex to generate personalized SERPs for a user.

- Before the official roll out, the algorithm was tested on 50 000 000 users.

- CTR on on the first position of a personalized SERP is 37% better than on non-personalized one.

- There are 2 parts of “personalization”: search suggestions and search results.

Personalized search suggestions on Yandex

Yandex always paid a lot of attention to search suggestions. According to them, up to 50% of people click on the suggestions. Personalization of the search suggestions comes in 4 different shapes:

- The search terms that a user searched for earlier are shown on top of the list of search suggestions in purple (resembling clicked links). Yandex claims that 24% of all search queries are repeated, i.e. users already searched for them in the past.

- The websites that a user visits frequently and tends to click on in SERPs will be included into personalized search suggestions.

- Yandex classified all users into approximately 400 000 groups based on their interests. For each interest group the search suggestions are different.

- Yandex now displays more search suggestions related to other search queries within the same search session. According to Yandex, they show session-based suggestions on average 53 million times every day.

Personalized search results on Yandex

Personalization of search results concerns a lot of different aspects, such as user’s geo location, interests, and search behavior.

Localized search results have already been very prominent on Yandex, and so were the language preferences. Since August 2011 Yandex was following whether users liked or disliked to receive search results in English, and showed more results in English to those who liked them (read, clicked on them), and less to those who didn’t.

Now personalization also takes into account “liked” or “disliked” sites, meaning that a user, who frequently click on certain sites, will see them more often and higher up in the SERPs. The sites the user tends to ignore (not click on in the SERPs) will be shown to him / her less often and on lower positions.

Russian language is complex, and a lot of words can mean several different things. A while ago, Yandex started to give “dialog-like” suggestions refining such queries. For instance, a user searching for “кино” might mean a movie or a Russian rock bad called “кино”). Before Yandex would present the user with links saying, “кино слушать” (Kino listen) and “кино в рио” (Movies in Rio; where Rio is a cinema chain). Now Yandex thinks they can predict what a particular user is looking for and present the user with the search results with dominating music or movie listings.

What is interesting is that Yandex personalizes SERPs by default for all users, regardless if they are logged in or not. It is possible to disable personalization by logging in and changing account settings (which of course very few people will do).

According to Yandex representatives, in one third of the cases the top 5 search results for the same query are completely different.

What does this mean for Yandex SEO?

I believe that in this new environment the following 4 aspects of working with websites will become crucial:

- building a brand

- building authority

- improving user experience and usability

- working on improving behavioral factors

Strong brands will naturally benefit from this algorithm change: in the SERPs people tend to click more on known brands, stay there longer and even if some of the sites lack usability, people are more patient and stay longer, when they recognize and favor the brand. Hence, better rankings on Yandex.

Certain sites might see increase in traffic for generic key terms, where Yandex might show them higher than, for example, Wikipedia, to the users, who behave like they are in a shopping mode.

Intuitive interface and pleasant design of a website might positively influence the traffic due to better behavioral factors: more time spent on site, lower bounce rate.

The sites that solely relied on links in their SEO efforts, will most likely be the losers in the new personalized web.

General speaking, Yandex’s personalized search will not change the way most of Western SEOs work. Over the years I saw Yandex making a lot of big and little steps to showing webmaster that in order to succeed they have to think beyond paid links. Now, I believe, Yandex got SEOs to scratch their heads, which is a great thing! It is, of course, too early to judge, but I believe this change will make the RuNet a better place.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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All of us worked with or at least heard about rich snippets in Google. Rich snippets are great, but since implementation requires some development, a lot of however neglect them. There is always a better way to spend those precious developers’ hours, so the requests for those small pieces of code often end up being pushed in the bottom of backlogs and never makes it to the top. Does is sound familiar? Unfortunately.

When working with Yandex, there are also certain tricks to distinguish site snippet in the SERPs, and they are actually quite easy to implement. In most of cases I list in this article you won’t need developers’ help at all.

1. Title and Meta Description tags

The basis of a great snippet is of course great Title and great Meta Description tags.

The title for Yandex should not exceed 70 characters, including spaces, and contain relevant keywords. Meta Description tag can be around 150-160 characters long and should describe the page content in the best possible way.

When the tags are not written in a good way, Yandex often replaces Titles and Meta Description with snippets of text from the page, or data from DMOZ or Yandex Catalog, which is often not ideal. While there is a possibility to opt out of using DMOZ and YaCa copy, it is difficult to predict what piece of text Yandex will pick up from the page to replace a carelessly written description. In the example below, instead of a could-have-been converting text with great call to action, description contains bread crumbs (poker articles >> poker strategies >> read more) and random text strings:

2. Favicon

Favicon in the SERPs is something special for Yandex. Effective favicon can do a lot to your CTR, but being used to Google’s SERP layout, many webmasters do not take this feature into consideration. For example, compare the 3 search results for “weather in Paris” (погода в париже):

The third result without a favicon does not stand out as much as the other two.

Make sure your favicon is simple and clear, made in bright distinctive colors and stands out comparing to your SERP competitors.

3. Sitelinks

Just like Google, Yandex can display sitelinks in the SERPs. Similarly, sitelinks are generated automatically based on the importance and weight of pages.

Yandex gives webmasters more control over sitelinks for their sites than Google. Using Yandex Webmaster tools, you can remove unwanted sitelinks, and choose the anchor text for each sitelink from several variations offered by Yandex.

4. Capitalization in “display” URL

Yandex allows to change capitalization in longer domain names in order to make them more readable. For example, I could configure that russiansearchtips.com would display as RussianSearchTips.com in Yandex SERP.

Here is another example from online poker industry – both domain names use the capitalization feature:

Capitalization of domain name can be configured through Yandex Webmaster.

5. Social links

Links to social profiles in snippets is one of the newest features introduced by Yandex. In order for the links to your/ your company profiles vKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and YouTube to appear in the snippet, they have to be present on the homepage and linked via Yandex Spravochnik (analog of Google Places) / configured through Yandex Webmaster.

I covered the process for getting social links in Yandex snippets in one of my earlier posts. Please feel free to have a look!

6. Special snippets for businesses

Yandex allows business owners to add a lot of additional information about different types of companies and organizations in their snippets. For example, for a hotel website it is possible to display its star rating, number of rooms and available facilities (in the example below Hotel Beta is displaying the following information through their special snippet: 3 star hotel; 1000 rooms;  restaurant, Internet access, air conditioning and a mini bar):

Currently special snippets are available for 75 types of organizations, such as, for example, restaurants, bars, night clubs, hotels, shopping malls, petrol stations and pharmacies.

This type of snippet is only available for official sites of organizations, and cannot be used by guides or affiliates.

The information for special snippets can be submitted via Yandex Webmaster or via Yandex Spravochnik.

7. Contact information

The contact information (address and phone number) can be displayed in a snippet for an official site of almost any kind of organization, regardless if there is a support for special snippets for its type of business.

The contact information can be submitted via Yandex Webmaster or via Yandex Spravochnik.

8. Product information for retailers

For retailers Yandex can display product information and even prices right in the SERPs. In the example below the snippet displays the price of an item (iPhone 4 32GB) and area available for delivery (Moscow):

Product information in the snippets is displayed automatically for Yandex Market (analog of Google Shopping) advertizers.

For those who does not advertise on Yandex Market, it is possible to submit product information via Yandex Webmaster tools. This way is a little bit more complicated, as the product information needs to be in YML (Yandex market language), which is a special type of XML file supported by Yandex Market. Generating an YML file might require some development, but the results will pay off (especially for stores with competitive prices).

Why care about Yandex snippets?

Apart from the obvious reason that a better snippet will result in better CTR and consequently in more organic traffic, there is another important motive: Yandex gives a lot of weight to so-called “behavioral” factors in the ranking formula, and SERP click-through rate is one of them. Improving snippets and SERP CTR should be high on your agenda, because better snippets will not only bring you more visitors, but also help your site to rank better!

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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In one of my posts in the end of last year I was writing about social signals and Yandex SEO. Back then I said that social as such did not affect organic rankings, but I also mentioned that had a feeling that it was about to change. The step towards social was logical for a NASDAQ company, which Yandex is. Google and Bing use social signals in their search algorithm, and Yandex was bound to follow.

Some month ago Yandex started displaying links to social profiles in site snippets in their SERPs. Then it became obvious that something was about to happen, and indeed, just a month later Yandex announced Twitter integration and Search in social networks.

What Yandex social network search is really about

The service, so-called “People Search” went live on February 17. By then Yandex had indexed 250 million social profiles from all popular Russian social networks. Facebook, Twitter and Live Journal provide Yandex with data feeds to power “people search”. Odnoklassniki, vKontakte and Moi Mir @ Mail..ru do not provide the feeds and are being indexed by Yandex bots (hence the information is not updated as quickly as in case with dedicated feeds).

The search algorithm for social profiles in not exactly sophisticated: right now the profiles that have most information rank higher. There is no regional influence in the current version of the algorithm, meaning that, unlike web search, the SERPs will be the same for users in any place in our outside Russia. The parameters for social profile search currently are: name, city, age, education, work.

Let’s try to find Nina Ivanova (a very common Russian name), who lives in Moscow and studies at Moscow State University:

Yandex People Search found 2 profiles matching the parameters: one in Odnoklassniki and one vKontakte.

Searching for my name, I managed to locate my profiles on Twitter and Google+ (the first two results are not me!). It seems like People Search does not take in LinkedIn data, otherwise my profile would have shown up as well, since it is also public.

According to Ilya Segalovich (Yandex CTO), about 4% of all search queries in Yandex are people’s names (or 2% excluding celebrities – which is 2 million per day!).

Having social network search in Russia totally makes sense: while in most Western countries pretty much anyone can be found on Facebook, in Russia there are several popular networks, which makes it more difficult to find and connect with people.

How will this affect Yandex SEO?

Obviously, the data from social networks is extremely valuable, and once getting hold of it, Yandex will use it to its maximum potential.

In his recent interview to Lenta.ru Ilya Segalovich said that social products will appear in Yandex News (similar to Google News service). He also noted that if the information is “liked” and shared, that means it is important, and this gives the whole new way of looking at it (read the new way of ranking it).

Reading the interview, I got a general impression that social signals will mainly be used in ranking fresh content (breaking news, current events etc.). “7-15% of all searches in Yandex are related to fresh information, and more than half of them are somehow affected by social signals,” said Segalovich, and added that a lot of content is produced around the web every minute, but not all of it is interesting to the society. By incorporating social signals Yandex should be able to determine which content people like and want to see, and rank it accordingly.

The pressure is on! SEO-optimized content will no longer be enough for traffic generation. Or what do you think?

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Everyone knows that Russia is a very big country. Not everyone knows, however, that Yandex has a very advanced local search technology that is able to deliver local SERPs to all 83 regions of the country.

Yandex started actively working with local search results in 2008-2009 and has been perfecting the formula ever since. In the past I wrote several posts about regional SERPs and how to change the regional affinity in Yandex Webmaster, but haven’t really touched the topic of how to correctly configure regional settings for Yandex SEO from the beginning. This is what this post is about.

Regional settings are important if you work with so-called “geo-dependent” search queries, such as “Italian restaurant”, “flower delivery” and other product and service that can be purchased locally. If you are dealing with geo-independent queries, for example “online games” or “pasta recipes”, no need to worry about regional affinity at all.

According to Yandex’s own recommendations (in Russian) on how to deal with regional settings for websites, the basic actions for the site owner should be:

1.  Provide full company address, including post code, and contact phone numbers, including area code for the relevant region, on the website.

2. Assign the relevant region via Yandex Webmaster and Yandex Spravochnik (Yandex’s product similar to Google Places).

3. If a business operates in several regions, provide full contact information for all regional offices.

Although Yandex does not explicitly advises so, it is always good to submit a website to Yandex Catalog and assign relevant region there as well.

Multi-regional websites

Even though Yandex claims that it is possible to have several regions associated with one website, there seems to be a limit. For example, Yandex Catalog allows only 7 regions to be connected to one listing.

In cases when a company provides services in all (or a large number) of regions, the most common practice is to create directories, subdomains or even separate websites for each of them.

The procedure for assigning region to each directory or subdomain is the same as described above.

Here are some good examples of how large websites handle their regional-specific sections:

1. Region-specific directories

2. Region-specific subdomains

Yandex SEO strategies for multi-regional websites

1. Content

Be as local as possible. Write region-centered content, for example, use “restaurants in Moscow” instead of just “restaurants” in your text copy, try to use local terminology, where applicable.

2. Domains and URLs

No matter how the regional sections are organized (directories, subdomains or separate domains), the name of the region should be present and prominent in the URL. This will help Yandex to classify the site correctly.

Russians often use abbreviations for region/ city names such as “spb” for St. Petersburg, “msk” for Moscow, “nsk” for Novosibirsk. It is fine to use them in directory / domain names; Yandex will understand the meaning.

Good examples:

http://www.kras.mts.ru/?fromgt=1 for targeting Krasnoyarsk

http://pyaterochka.ru/shops/ekaterinburg/ for targeting Ekaterinburg

http://www.tomsk.tele2.ru/ for targeting Tomsk

Bad example:

http://www.sportmaster.ru/store/490/ for targeting Vladivostok

3. Links

Local links are very important when it comes to ranking in regional SERPs. Make sure to register the company in local directories, and make sure than all incoming links you acquire have the right regional affinity.

4. Moscow

The capital is the toughest region for Yandex SEO. Depending on keyword difficulty, you might even want to assign region Moscow to your homepage to be able to match the competition.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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A few weeks ago I wrote about Yandex displaying links to companies’ profiles on different social media sites in snippets:

These links are pretty good to have for promoting social profiles as well as for improving CTR from the SERP (which is a very important Yandex ranking factor!). Russian SEO community very quickly figured that in order to get social links in snippets one would need to place them on the homepage. Yesterday Yandex published an official guide (in Russian) on how to do it.

Basically, there are 2 ways:

1. Placing links to social profiles on website’s homepage.

2. Linking social profiles from a company profile in Yandex Spravochnik (something similar to Google Places). The easiest way to do it is by adding the company to Yandex Spravochnik via Yandex Webmaster, and then editing the social links from Yandex Webmaster interface.

The supported social networks for this feature are vKontakte, Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter and YouTube.

To qualify for social links in snippets you will need to link to at least 2 social profiles.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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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.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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