Just a few hours ago Yandex announced that next week they will launch yet another version of their search algorithm! This time the change is aiming at eliminating “over-optimized” content, i.e. texts stuffed with keywords and almost unreadable for the end user due to that.

Yandex recommend the webmasters, who intentionally over-optimized their websites’ content in order to improve positions in the search results, to go through the texts and make them more reader-friendly.

Yandex also promise that penalized for “over-optimization” pages will come back to their old positions once the problem is fixed.

SearchEngines.ru in their coverage of the algorithm stated that already last week one could unusually big chnges in Yandex search results, which probably were related to the first roll-out stage:

* SERP updates for Yandex, as well as the other major search engines, can be monitored using Update Analyzer from Analyzethis.ru. Awesome and very useful tool, when working with SEO for Yandex, since, as I wrote in my earlier posts, Yandex is rolling out big updates on a regular basis.

I would like to remind you once again that Yandex is extremely good at understanding Russian language, its grammar and morphology. If you are using auto-translated or auto-generated content on your Russian version of the website (which is unfortunatelly quite common), you’ve got one week to re-write it in a good language

You can test the new algorithm in action on buki.yandex.ru – Yandex’s sandbox open for everyone’s use.

Only recently Google announced support of so-called Authorship Markup, and at the same time Yandex declared a war against content theft.

In Yandex Search Blog they called all webmasters to Alpha-Test the new tool in Yandex Webmaster Tools kit called “Original Texts”. To be able to participate in this test, you need to have a site with TIC of at least 10.

All you need to do to claim your content authorship in WM tools is to

1. Add a module called “Original texts” in “Site Content” tab.

2. Submit your original content into the tool some time BEFORE publishing it online.

This information is supposed to be used by the algorithm to determine (and consequently rank) the original content (however there is no guarantee that it will be used, say Yandex)

The texts/ articles are recommended to be something between 2000 and 3200 characters long.

It’s too early to say if this new technology will help to make the Internet a fairer place Seems like a challenging task in terms or processing times and server capacity, but time will tell, and for now, thank you Yandex!

Some weeks ago I wrote a post about faking user behavor in SERPs becoming a common practice in Russian SEO (and especially SEO for Yandex). Yandex warned that these practices will hurt rather than help, but apparently people did not listen.

Today I read on Vedomosti.ru (one of the major Russian newspapers) that Yandex penalized over 1000 websites for using scripts imitating user behavior in SERPs (being more specific, creating fake searches on ‘Yandex and inflating CTR for selected keywords), as well as website of SEO compnies offering the spammy services (specifically were mentioned the following agencies: RBS (РБС), Megaseo, Perfectseo, Userator, Megaindex). Spokesman of Yandex admittet that the tactics worked and helped the companies to increase their organic rankings on Yandex.

The SEO companies in question deny the fact of using software on their clients’ website and blame dishonest competitors. Yandex say they thought of this possibility and rulled it out after thorough analysis.

My main takeaways from this :

1. Maximizing your SERP CTR should be an important part of your Yandex SEO strategy.

2. Yandex can see seo-links as well as seo-clicks.

3. Still no real penalty for paid links!

Happy optimizing!

In my last post I wrote how important the behavioral factors are for SEO for Yandex. Researching that subject more, I stumbled upon very curious piece of software called “Userator”. This software is supposed to simulate users’ behavior and by that improve your positions in Yandex.

Obviously it is a very spammy thing. Moreover, most probably it is a scam, however one can’t be 100% sure here. Not so long ago Yandex made an official statement (in Russian) that they are aware of these kind of software, consider it being spam and will penalize websites trying to fake CTR and other behavioral factors by using bots. That makes one think that these softwares might actually work, and since Yandex cannot identify which clicks are ”real” and which are ”fake”, they are just trying to scare spammers. Who knows.

The idea of the Userator system is stupid simple. They recruit people, who get paid for installing Userator software on their computers and delivering fake clicks to the sites in the system (done by the software; the owner of the computer has no idea what is happening in the background and can use his/her computer as usually). People get paid for doing nothing = Great! Always works in Russia…

For the clients Userator does the following:

a) Simulates clicks from Yandex/ Google/ Rambler SERPs for desired search queries and ”stays” on the website for a period of time. The length of stay can be configured in the system. This also gave spammers the idea to use Userator to hurt the competitors’ websites by configuring the system to bounce from their pages ranking for the same key terms.

b) Simulates clicks to the client’s website from links on other sites (client’s backlinks), by that ”strengthening” the links and making them more trustworthy. Again, everything here is configurable.

At the moment the Userator thing reports over 6000 client websites (not much) with over 46 000 search queries in use. Clicks are driven to these websites from 2,5k different IPs. The fake users stay on clients’ sites for about 20 minutes on average.

I tried to find reviews or blog entries about using Userator as a part of SEO strategy, but didn’t come across anything sufficient, apart from this happy user, if that was a real user at all (in Russian)…

For all of us these new behavioral factors, unlike links, are something intangible. It is hard to estimate the effect of better CTR and longer average time spent on a site. No one really knows if faking user behavior is worthwhile. I firmly believe it’s useless and will hurt more than help, sooner or later. Quality sites, good content, strong incoming links and usability are the things that are really important for SEO. Having all that, the behavioral factors will come naturally.

Or what do you think?

After the lame talk about SEO for Yandex Andy and Rand gave at SMX, I thought would be good to write something more practical; how it works with Yandex for real.

Recently I wrote a short update on new algorithm and technologies Yandex uses to rank websites, and these are the practical tips on how to optimize for Yandex in the age of Krasnodar, MatrixNet and Spektr.

Yandex SEO is in a way quite similar to Google SEO, but with a twist

Just a couple of years ago, before Snezhinsk, Yandex SERP was quite easy to manipulate. All you needed is links, and everything would do: footers, side bars, sites about dogs, sites about kitchen furniture or plastic windows. All you needed is quantity. Links were easy to get through link brokers like Sape.ru and alikes.

In 2009 Yandex started to tweak their algorithm to get rid of spam and provide their users with good information, just like any other search engine. The algorithm has become very complex and, as they claim, intelligent. The technology behind it is called MatrixNet, which is in essence a technology of machine learning. Yandex learns what people wants and refines the SERPs based on the learnings.

Just like with Google, nobody knows all the factors taken into consideration by Yandex. Just like with Google, there are best practices that work.

Onsite SEO for Yandex

Onsite SEO is very similar to what you would do for Google: content is the king and all that…

- Relevance of the page to the search query: keywords in Title and Meta Description tags; keywords in Meta Keywords tag (does not really help much in my opinion, but some people would argue), keywords in ALT tags for images.

- Content: the content should be unique and of a good quality. It is vital to maintain good grammar, as Yandex is very good with understanding Russian language. Just like with Google, it is important to update the website with fresh content on a regular basis. And lastly, create clusters of pages for similar keywords to strengthen the relevancy.

- Internal linking: Yandex likes internal links in content. Do not rely solely on navigation and footer. Place internal links with optimized anchor texts into the content.

- Site quality: do everything to keep the website healthy. Make sure that there are no broken links, that all pages work and 404 error is configured correctly. Make a good use of your robots.txt. This does not only help Yandex to identify your website as a quality resource, but also provides good user experience for the visitors.

In the latest versions of the algorithm the weight of onsite SEO factors seems to be increasing.

Make sure to not over-optimize the page. Avoid keyword stuffing and thin content. Just like Googel, Yandex does not like that.

Offsite SEO for Yandex (aka link building)

Link building in Russia is a pretty wild and aggressive area. Two years ago I attended an SEO conference in Moscow, where Yandex representative declared from the stage that they are aware of the fact that 90% of all links in RuNet (aka Russian internet) are paid, and that they are going to fight that.

Yet, this year browsing job listings in Moscow I stumbled on a well-paid SEO job in one of the leading Online Marketing agencies in Russia, where one of the main requirements was “profound knowledge of the main link brokers and their features”. Links are being bought openly via link brokers; and it works. I honestly prefer not to use platforms like Sape.ru and have a more personal approach, but nevertheless, what you need to keep in mind doing link building in Russia is:

- Do not get links from low quality sites which are clearly made for the purpose of selling links. It does not really work anymore.

- Do not get links in footers and other spammy areas. That does not work either.

- Aim for on-topic websites, i.e. sites in your vertical. That will help to improve you rankings, build authority and increase TIC (aka Page Rank of Yandex).

- Aim for quality websites: good content, respectful domain age, good number of indexed pages, high TIC, no or very few sold links on the website.

- When getting links via brokers, you are often required to pay for a period of time (e.g. month, year etc.). That is generally not great. Try to get links that will stay on the website forever, e.g. in news and articles. It looks more natural both in terms of placement and stability of link growth.

From my experience, links from newspapers work pretty well. You can either approach their PR people and pay a lot of money to be placed in a good section; or buy articles in some hidden sub-categories via platforms like Miralinks.

- Make sure your links look natural, like they were placed by webmaster and for the readers, and not by SAPE script and for Yandex.

- Some Russian directories are still good, for example Yandex Catalog.

Behavioral factors taken into account by Yandex’s ranking algorithm

With implementation of Matrixnet, behavioral factors has become an important part of optimizing websites for Yandex. The SEO community is uncertain, which metrics Yandex looks at and where they collect the data.

Obviously Yandex has it’s Yandex.Metrika (analytics package, similar to Google Analytics) and Yandex toolbar, but I don’t know if this data can be reliable for them. I couldn’t find any numbers regarding the percentage of sites using Yandex.Metrika. For what I know, Google Analytics is quite popular in Russia.

Many SEOs speculate about behavioral factors, but the most common opinion is that the most important ones are:

- CTR from the SERP

- Average time spent on the page after the click from the SERP

- Bounce rate from the page back to the SERP

So the tips are classic: write compelling titles and descriptions, create interesting content and provide good user experience.

The quality of your SEO efforts, both onsite and offsite, will be rewarded by Yandex with trust and higher rankings!

Today Yandex search team announced that they implemented support for rel=”canonical”.

The explanation what the canonical element is about says :

“Your website might contain pages with different URLs, but very similar or identical content. For example the same page can be accessible at

www.examplesite.ru/pages?id=2
www.examplesite.ru/blog

with the help of rel=”canonical” you can point which page you prefer to have indexed”.

Reading the advanced help section I also learned that Yandex will NOT support cross-domain canonicalization.

Let me remind you that Google introduced canonical tag in 2009. Yandex started to read “nofollow” attribute and already then promised to implement support for rel=”canonical”. Now we’ve got it!

What one can see here is that Yandex is aiming to comply with global standards, which will make life easier for many SEOs!

A few days ago Yandex posted several interesting job openings, including server-side SERP developer and research technician for SERP speed project. Later Anatoliy Orlov (acting Head of Development at Yandex) shared some comments in his private blog.

Apparently, Yandex is changing the technology behind its SERPs, switching from Perl to JavaScript. Anatoliy motivates this decision of Yandex by several reasons. First, writes Anatoliy, the current technology and architecture of the SERP is, although, served it’s purpose well, is outdated and needs to be replaced by a new one, which will make Yandex SERPs faster, better structured and more transparent. Second, most of the modern websites are built with Ajax and switching to JS is just a logical step, as Javascript is already a big part of Yandex SERPs.

This sounds like a very challenging project for Yandex. Also sounds like a challenging project for various rank checkers for Yandex, which will need to crack the new technology and learn to parse the new SERPs.

Russian SEO bloggers speculate about the possible outcome of this new Yandex’s SERP architecture. Some even predict “live updates” and “instant search” like the ones of Google.

Time will tell, but it is definitely an interesting turn.

I’ve been using a software called Advanced Web Ranking for monitoring search engine rankings for several years for now. I think the software is awesome! It has all the necessary features, and the customer support is very helpful. I won’t write a review here, but just refer to a very thorough one on SEObook.

Now, this is not and ad and not an affiliate post, but a friendly advice. The software is solid and works great. It supports a lot of different search engines, including Yandex. All you need is to get a Russian proxy, since Yandex’s SERPs are geo-targeted and you will see very different results from the US, Europe and Russia.

If you are operating from abroad, I would guess the risk that your site will get regional ties or that you target geo-dependent keywords is rather low. Therefore Advanced Web Ranking and a Russian proxy is basically all you need to create neat rank reports.

Beware that Yandex has become very sensitive to automated SERP parsing. I got 2 proxies blocked a year ago because the tool was sending queries too quickly. Once I got them blocked, I was never able to use them again without seeing captcha first.. AWR has “search engine friendly” settings tab. I advise you to configure a very long time span to avoid this kind of problems.

Now, my good old friend Olga Gabdulkhakova, who stole my content and posted it on Search Engine Land without giving me any credit, has come up with one piece of unique content in that masterpiece of hers. She suggests to use the rank checker from Link Assistant. With all my dislike and disrespect for that shameless person, I checked the tool out (the free version only though) and it was not bad. I have not seen many mentions of it in Russian SEO forums, but it seems to work alright.

Still, these kind of statements made by Link Assistant people put me off so much “It will check up to 500 hundred keywords within 4 minutes, while checking them manually would take over 10 hours of work.” Seriously, what a selling point!

Once again, from my personal experience Advanced Web Ranking is a good and reliable software to check rankings in Yandex! Highly recommended!

Some months ago I wrote a post about Yandex and “nofollow” attribute of the <A> tag. Yandex did not, for some obscure reason, read nofollow attribute, so any “nofollowed” link was passing just as much link juice as a direct link in the eyes of Yandex. In order to prevent unwanted links being indexed until now webmasters used tag <noindex> around the piece of code with the link.

Last week however things changed. I did not see any public announcement, but many SEOs noticed that the amount of backlinks in Yandex Webmaster tools dramatically decreased for many websites, and this is because suddenly Yandex started to understand rel=”nofollow”.  A note about that also appeared in Webmaster Help (in Russian).

This will change things for a lot of websites. Forum and blog comments spam, as well as spamming Wikipedia, was very common SEO technique and it worked fairly well in not-so-competitive verticals. SEO forums were full of complaints last week. I find it rather funny. OMG! Now we actually have to work and think to get those good links! =)

All in all, I think Yandex SEO trends follow those of Google, still with a couple of years of delay. The next step towards civilized optimization is going to be taken in the coming months: Yandex announced that they are planning to support rel=”canonical”.

It is a well known trend – people move from searching for keywords to asking questions. The share of keyword questions is increasing every year according to all the major search engines. Last year Wordtracker even introduced a keyword tool dedicated to keyword questions research.

Yandex is not an exception. Accoring to the latest report, 3 out of 100 million searches on Yandex are questions.

About 50% of all questions asked by Yandex audience start with HOW, 17,5% – with WHERE, 8,15% – with WHEN.

Questions can be a great addition to your keyword strategy! While not many people optimize for question, some of them have impressive search volumes!

Unfortunately I have not come across any tool for keyword question research in Russian. The only way top find those great questions is to dig into your own data. Sometimes Yandex Wordstat can give you some hints.

Don’t miss out on a great opportunity to easily get additional traffic to your site!