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.

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.

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.

As we all know, both Google and Bing are using social signals such as tweets, Facebook shares, Google+ shares etc., as a component of their ranking formula. But very little, if anything, has been said about Yandex so far.

Preston Carey actually received this question at SMX London earlier this year and came back with a very vague explanation of a kind “kind of sort of but not really”.

Also, as we know, for the last year Yandex has been busy with tweaking their new algorithm based on machine learning and trying to understand what their users want based on their search behavior. Nothing is pointing towards social signals being important for Yandex SEO, but I believe social will play a bigger role in the future, and here is why:

1. Yandex keeps a close eye on Twitter in Russia

A year ago I wrote about the report on Twitter usage in Russia, which Yandex posted on their corporate blog. This year Yandex created a follow up and published updated stats with some nice infographics. The article, unfortunately, is only in Russian, but here are the main takeaways:

• there is over 1 million Twitter accounts in Russian
• there are 370 thousand tweets written in Russian daily; 85 of them are retweets, around 30% – replies to other tweets
• during the day there are only 64 thousand active users writing updates on Twitter (6,4% of all Russian accounts)
• there are less active accounts than in 2010, but they tweet more

2. Yandex offered a possibility to sign in into any of its services with accounts in any major social networks and sites

Russians are the most socially engaged nation in the world, and social networks own a lot of personal data about Internet users. Since all major Russian social networks provide advertising platforms with powerful targeting possibilities, Yandex has to compete with them for users and for adertising budgets.

Just like Facebook in the west, Russian vKontakte (recently rebranded to vk.com), MoiMor@mail.ru and Odoklassniki.ru own huge amounts of personal information, which is probably more reliable that “user intent” calculated by Yandex’s machine learning technology. I believe Yandex will have to look at social in order to stay competitive and keep the money flowing into Yandex.Direct (which is their biggest revenue source).

3. Yandex developed it’s own “Share” widget

Not many people know, but Yandex has its own widget for sharing infortmation in social networks: http://api.yandex.ru/share/. Obviously all the information about shares is recorded by Yandex.

4. Recently launched product “Yandex app search” incorporates social signals

Although missed by many press-release-rewrites, Yandex based their ranking algorithm for mobile apps not only on rankings in AppStore/ Android Market, but also on mentions in social networks.

The clients I’ve been working for were not active in social media, so I have no personal experience with this. Russian SEO society, known for being very creative when it comes to cheating search engine algorithms, recognizes that tweets (especially tweets from authority accounts) help to speed up crawling by both Google and Yandex. I have not come across any records of tweets, or any social media shares, helping to better rank in Yandex.

So are social signals important for Yandex SEO? Probably not that much at the moment. Will they be? I’d bet!

For almost a year now Yandex is using machine learning technology aka Matrixnet. Until recently, the “learnings” were used for improving the SERPs: eliminating spam, understanding users’ intents in cases when search queries are too generic or have multiple possible meanings etc. etc. Opinions differ, but all in all the quality of search results is much better than when I started writing RussianSearchTips.

A week ago Yandex launched yet another search algorithm Reykjavík. They call it their first step towards personalized search. Reykjavík aims to adapt to users’ language preferences, i.e. shows more results in English to those who likes (and clicks on) results in English and the other way around.

Last week yet another human aspect was brought to the world’s attention: behavioral targeting for display advertising. Sounds good, right? But here comes the weird part.. or rather parts

a) “Behavioral targeting” includes dividing the audiences into 2 groups by gender, 5 groups by age and 2 groups by income.. Hmm, not that is interesting. The new technology called Crypta, which is behind this targeting, analyses search queries of Internet users and by looking on what people are searching for, it assigns them to these categories. But income, medium or high, still? C’mon!

b) Yandex is positioning this “smart” targeting as a “Super-premium” service and is charging 1,5 times more for using it, comparing to traditional targeting options. This comes as a surprise to me, since testing these things with both Bing and Google, from my experience, gave nothing. Yandex, however, prior to releasing this targeting, published a number or research papers of how and what different gender and age group search, so now, supported by all those stats, this “smart” targeting can actually sell..perhaps.

Now, a few other things I find amusing. Mail.ru, owning 2 major social networks in Russia (Odnoklassniki.ru and MoiKrug.ru) commented to CNews.ru that “when the (market) players do not possess actual information about their users, they are forced to replace it by hypothetical assumptions based on statistical algorithms. Not sure, Yandex’s approach can be a sufficient replacement for real knowledge about their audience”. WOW, I thought. That is mean.

But guess what, the day before yesterday Yandex released another new feature! Now you can sign in into ANY Yandex service with your account in several social media sites , namely Vkontakte, Odnoklassniks, Facebook, Google, Mail.Ru or Twitter! This feature is available on all devices. Ha-ha, and how is that for “not possessing real data”? Working on it, working on it

I am not sure, when or if antitrust and privacy law suits will hit Yandex, but these developments are really fun to watch! Looking forward to further developments

Online Advertizing is booming in Russia, and, unlike many European markets, there are a few platforms available, that can deliver sufficient amounts of traffic.

Apart from the Market leader Yandex and their Yandex.Direct with massive search and content networks, you have Google AdWords, Begun (content ad network), social PPC on VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.ru, you name it.

Recently Mail.ru announced creation of their new ad platform, which will serve ads in their social network MoiMir. MoiMir is the 4th largest network in Russia and is bigger than FaceBook.

Mail.ru started up as a free email service and with the time turned into Russia’s second largest portal and a  major search engine (although they have not used their own search algorithm until recently, relying on those of Google and Yandex).

In late 2010 Mail.ru filed for IPO. From then on they have been recruiting talents from all over the place, including several top managers from Begun ad network.

Looks like Mail.ru are serious about what they are doing. I believe MoiMir will be able deliver quality traffic and sales, while providing good UI. This new ad serving platform is definitely something I will be looking into.

I mentioned in one of my previous posts that in 2009 Russia was announced the world’s most engaged social networking audience (ComScore report). And even though I am a bit skeptical about all the social media buzz these days, I felt like I had to describe the Russian social networks.

While I mentioned Twitter in Russia a number of times in my other posts, I practically ignored the biggest Russian social marketing channel. And even though Twitter is a hot trend these days, and it’s grown up to 183.000 users during the winter, Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki is the place where most of your potential customers are.

Here is the distribution of the audience among the biggest social networks in Russia:

Below I provide a short description of 3 most important Russian networks in comparison with known .COM networks.

Vkontakte.ru

Vkontakte.ru (“In touch” or “keeping contact” in Russian) is the biggest social network in Russia. It looks pretty much like Facebook, although with less functionality. Some people even say that Vkontakte copied FB and that FB tried to sue Vkontakte.. I haven’t come across any official information, but still.. looking at it one can hardly deny the resemblance…

Front page of the Russian social network Vkontakte

Just like Facebook, Vkontakte users can create profiles with their content, connect with friends, create and join groups. Groups have more or less the same functionality as FB groups, i.e. publish links, posts, videos and photos on the wall.

Just as FB group pages, Vkontakte group pages can be programmed, rebuilt and optimized. With a good knowledge of Vkontakte internal programming language one can develop subpages and navigation menus, add banners and links to external websites etc. All in all, Vkontakte group can look rather proper.
Vkontakte also has similar to Facebook advertisement program with similar targeting options.

Odnoklassniki.ru

Odnoklassniki.ru (means “classmates” in Russian) is a popular social media platform where people search for their classmates, colleagues and university friends. The search is organized by Name, Location, University / school name, Year of graduation, Place and year or army service etc.

Every person signing up creates a profile and can connect with friends, publish photos, update status and join groups. Neither profiles nor group pages are public (i.e. are not open for search engines). There is no such thing as a fan page. There is no possibility to search for groups.

Front page of the Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru

Odnoklassniki has become a very spammy platform. I personally deleted my profile due to enormous amount of phishy links and sexually related messages coming into my inbox. It was annoying and I left There are of course possibilities for paid advertisement like banners etc. provided by Odnoklassniki itself.

Moikrug.ru

Moikrug.ru (”My circle” in Russian) is some kind of imitation of Linkedin, i.e. a business network, where people connect with their business contacts. Job search function is quite popular there as well.

Front page of the Russian social network Moikrug.ru

Moikrug is owned by Yandex.

Apart from personal profiles and networking, Moikrug also allows to create groups and discussions, like on LinkedIn.

Privet.ru

I have not looked into this so much, but it looks like a social network with various hosting possibilities, such as blogs, video and audio hosting etc. I will try to research more and write a post about this in the coming months.

Facebook in Russian

Facebook is rapidly growing in Russia and I believe will be big at some point. All the functionalitis are the same as for other languages.

As I wrote earlier, my company made me the chosen one (i.e. chosen to attend a Russian Pubcon - Optimization.ru conference in Moscow).

To be honest, I was a bit disappointed. Most of the sessions were way too basic for any half-way experienced SEO person, and generally the conference seemed very commercial.

Anyways, I managed to learn some lessons, and here they are:

1.    Soon webmasters will be able to edit snippets shown in the SERPs. There is a chance META description will replace today’s random snippets of text.

2.    Widgets for Yandex can be a good source of traffic (it is possible to create widgets for Yandex, just the same way as for iGoogle)

Alexandr Sadovsky

3.    Yandex finally created Webmaster Guidelines (similar to Google’s guidelines). Sadovskiy (Director of search = Matt Cuts of Yandex) joked that the guidelines are for white SEO and that webmasters should try to be at least somewhere in between

4.    Yandex knows that up to 90% of all links to Russian sites are bought. Sadovskiy publically announced that buying links is BAD!

5.    One guy said that Russians are more technical that analytical. Many people use Yandex Webmaster panel, but not many use analytics packages. Besides, 54% of of clients of SEO companies look at rankings only to evaluate success of the SEO campaign, and only 22% try to connect it with sales.

6.    Liveinternet statistics is extremely useful for keyword research

7.    Social media is developing. SMO is a trendy topic in Russian Internet circles.

8.    Webmasters are mainly happy about the new Yandex search algorithm Snezhinsk. There was very little said about it though..

9.    Russian SEOs try to use statistics and math to analyze search engine algorithms and PPC bids. They like long fancy formulas. Very scientific society.

10.    Radisson SAS Slavtanskaya in Moscow is not a good hotel. At all!

Yandex endorse microblogging. Yandex loves Twitter. But do you know how big Twitter is in Russia? Social marketers have created a lot of buzz around Twitter this year, and perhaps, rightly so. But entering Russian market and setting up you online marketing strategy, always remember: Russian Internet sphere is a) unique, b) not as developed as the Western Internet sphere, c) likes local products and services. So Twitter works for you in the US? This is how things are in Russia:

Worldwide Twitter has over 50 000 000 users, which produce 4 000 000 tweets every day. In Russia they’ve got only 76 000 Twitter users and approximately 50 000 tweets per day.

So what is the future of Twitter in Russia? Is it coming? Is it gonna become the place to be, search, communicate? Hmm.. Hard to say. It’s grown 10 times in 2009, but it is still very small. According to the Yandex’s rating of popular microblogs, the main action is happening at blogs@mail.ru and micorblogs on QIP.ru

Yandex also made a statement about Twitter: Twitter’s audience consists of geeks. Come to Twitter if you need exactly these people and you have something to tell them.

=)