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).

How much is too much?

The recent statement of Matt Cutts during Pubcon about the possibility of being penalized for having too many ads on the page triggered a lot of discussions among SEOs this week.

Not many know, however, that Yandex made a similar announcement just a few weeks ago.

New Yandex ranking formula

In the beginning of October Yandex incorporated “site usability” into its ranking formula. While usability is a very broad term, Yandex gives some hints that the algorithm change is mainly about ad placement on the page:

“As a first step we learned to detect if ads distract the user or add relevant information and value. The ranking formula now includes several ad-related factors. We detect if the ads prevent the user from viewing the main content, if the ads overlay the content, and if the page containing these ads still interests the user. Resources, where the ads are placed in appropriate way, often rank higher than the ones overloaded with advertizing.”

Sounds very similar to the Google’s announcement, doesn’t it?

Interestingly, shortly after the abovementioned update in Yandex ranking formula, Analyzethis.ru presented a new tool: Intrusive Ads Analyzer.

Intrusive Ads Analyzer - English Interface

The graph displays how ad heavy pages rank on average in different search engines. The numbers on the axis are not actual rankings, but rather coefficients based on analysis of pages ranking for certain search queries. The queries selected for this analysis are mainly Music, Video and Software related, which are probably the most spammy and overloaded with ads categories.

According to this tool, ad heavy sites still rank better in Yandex than in Google.

What does this mean for Yandex SEO?

This change is really nothing new. I see it as a logical development of the recent anti-spam methods introduced by Yandex search team. First they gave a lot of importance to behavioral factors, then implemented a rule against keyword stuffing. The first time Yandex expressed their negative attitude toward pop-ups and pop-unders was already back in 2009.

All they are trying to do is to give the answers that people like, which is a very high priority for them right now as their market share in Russia began to decrease.

What I feel is very likely to be important after this new algorithm change is:

• Amount and type of advertizing on the page
  I assume that pages with pop-up and pop-under ads as well as any kind of banners overlaying the text will be the most obvious candidates for a penalty. I also assume that too  many blocks of AdSense or Yandex.Direct links, especially situated above the fold, will raise a flag too.
• Behavioral factors
  Bounce rate from the page, time spent on the page, etc.
• Site load speed
  This factor was not publicly mentioned anywhere, but I believe it is be one of the basic signals when it comes to usability.
• Quality and amount of content on the page
  Unique content has been always important, and probably will be even more important now. It should not be overloaded with keywords. High keyword density will most likely hurt rand not help.
• Structure of the page
  Yandex is very likely to look at navigation links and where they point, as well as how the content is presented on each page. By this I mean the usage of headers (h1, h2, h3 etc.), tags like <p>, <br> and other ways of formating like <strong>, <i>, font size etc. The bottom line is, the text needs to be readable.

All in all, I think this is not a significant change and it does not imply that the tactics of Yandex SEO needs to be revised. This is just another reminder that websites should be made for the user, and only then optimized for search engines.

Mail.ru, the 3rd largest search engine in Russia after Yandex and Google.ru, with 7% market share, announced their plans to invest into developing their search technology. The company plans to double the amount of specialists developing their search engine.

In the past search on Mail.ru was powered by Yandex, but replaced by Google’s technology in 2010. At the same time, a part of queries in Mail.ru is processed by their own algorithm. According to Mail.ru CTO Vladimir Gabrielyan, this makes sence: Google’s engine is used for general queries, while Mail.ru can focus on improving, for example, local search.

Currently, the main services for Mail.ru are more social than anything else: messengers, online games, email, social networks. Mail.ru Group, listed on London Stock Exchange, owns Mail.ru portal, instant messenger ICQ and social network Odnoklassniki.ru. The Group also owns parts of companies like vKontakte (39,9%), Zynga (1,4%), Groupon (21,35%), Facebook (2,4%).

Will be interesting to follow this development. While Google and Yandex are fighting for Russian market, does Mail.ru has a chance to increase their share?

While Yandex holds 65% of contextual ads market in Russia, Google is claiming to have exponential growth in revenues in the country. Eric Schmidt of Google said in his interview to Vedomosti during his visit to St. Petersburg that Russia is one of their top 5 fastest growing markets.

Google have been trying hard to gain market share in Russia and other Russian-speaking countries, using even not-so-pretty methods, such as buying Yandex.Direct related terms to promote AdWords:

Source: http://yfrog.com/kg362cgj

I personally prefer AdWords system and interface when it comes to PPC, and here is why:

1.    AdWords allows for better structure, which makes it easier to manage large accounts. Yandex.Direct does not have ad groups, so a medium sized campaign looks like a long and incomprehensible list of keywords.

2.    AdWords interface is better translated! While I have no problems navigating AdWords in Russian, Yandex.Direct in English I find rather confusing. Every now and then you come across items and links in Russian; some things are literally translated from Russian and do not make much sense to non-Russian speaker.

3.    Yandex.Direct doesn’t have conversion tracking as such. If you want to track conversions, you will have to install Yandex.Metrika (their Google Analytics basically), which not everyone would want.. Otherwise you’ll have to use 3rd party software.

Yandex, of course, understands semantics of the Russian better and is able to filter out unrelated queries, even when it comes to the same words having several different meanings. But to be honest, I was very surprised by the quality of Russian traffic I got from Google, even though I used broad match for all keywords. What I found interesting is :

a)    Google seemed to be able to match close synonyms (nothing totally off, like you get on broad match in English sometimes, but still..)

b)    Google seemed to understand transliteration from Cyrillic into Latin and vice versa.

c)    Google seemed to be able to match different noun cases for targeted keywords, however not for negative keywords. Had to add all cases to the negatives manually.

All in all, Google AdWords is a fairly good platform to advertize in Russian and a good point to start working with the Russian market.

I saw this in a number of Russian newspapers during February and found it rather interesting. Based in Russia visual search engine Quintura is going to sue Google over technology used behind Google’s Wonder Wheel. Wonder Wheel is a service that helps to visualize semantic relations between keywords. Russian Quintura launched a similar service back in 2006, and received the last of its 8 patents for this technology in 2009.

Quintura's semantic search cloud

The results are not exactly the same:

Google's Wonder Wheel semantic cloud

Yakov Sadchikov, the CEO of Quintura, mentioned in his interview to Infox (In Russian) that there are several companies who violated the patents and that Quinura will demand that all of them pay for using the technology.