SEO and SEM tips for Russian search engines
Funny April Fool’s joke from Yandex: they said earlier today that they invented a unique algorithm that can analyze emails in Yandex.Mail inboxes and detect whether the message you are reading is a truth or a lie 
Would have been a great feature. Too bad it’s a joke!
Last week in Japan was released a book, the first book about global SEM and SEO ever written and published in Asia. It covers SEO and SEM principles for main search engines in Asia – Baidu, Naver, Yandex and Google. I was honored to have been asked for input for the Yandex part. Thank you Info Cubic Japan for this exciting opportunity to contribute!
Last week I received this cute Christmas card from Yandex. I found it nice, and I wanted to share it will all of you.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, my dear friends! Or, as we say in Russia, Веселого рождества и Счастливого нового года! =)
I bet all of you have seen “Social Network”, the movie about Facebook. Apparently a Google movie is also coming up. Following their Western colleagues, Russian film makers decided to produce a movie about yet another IT success, the most popular Russian search engine Yandex.
The movie under production title “Startup” is a joint effort of producer Irina Smolko, screenwriter Dmitry Sobolev and director Roman Karimov. The basis for the plot is the development of the Russian IT industry from the 90s until today, where Yandex is obviously one of they key figures.
Roman Karimov. Image credit: http://www.kinopoisk.ru
The crew is currently meeting representatives of various Russian IT companies and working on the screenplay.
“Dmitry can write a story that can be of interest to foreign audiences”, said Smolko, and added that they have already started looking for potential partners abroad.
Dmitry Sobolev. Image credit: http://www.kinopoisk.ru
Yandex spokesman admitted that they met the film makers and talked about the project, however said that the production is done without any financial support from Yandex.
Yesterday I read something, as I thought at first, totally ridiculous, but it seems to be happening for real. In Belarus from today it is forbidden to provide any kind of services or sell any kind of goods on the Internet from a website with any other top level domain than .BY.
Cnews.ru reports that according to the new law companies and individuals will be administratively punished for doing business with foreign sites. Even Internet cafes providing access to forbidden sites will be forced to pay fines. The fine for violating this law will be up to 30 “units”, which is currently 1,05 million Belarusian rubles, which is approximately 120 USD.
Interestingly, Belarusian citizens will not be charged for accessing foreign websites. I guess the government believes that the people of Belarus will abide the law and stop using beloved vkontakte.ru, Twitter and Facebook right away? What about watching YouTube videos? Nope! Send an email from @mil.ru? Nope! Seriously, how is this possible in 21st century?!
Belarus is not a big country. It’s population is only 9 million people (compare with the Ukraine – 46 mln, Russia – 142 mln). Belarusian Internet (so-called ByNet) can be described with the number*s below:
3 500 000: Internet users
43 000: registered .BY domains (on 28.12.2011)
Up to 94%: percentage of traffic, generated by Belarusian users, routed to Russian web resources
$6 100 000: value of Belarusian online advertising market in 2010
18 000: registered Twitter accounts belong to users from Belarus
80 000: Belarusian blogs in LiveJournal
18,3%: of Belarusian population have access to broadband Internet
150-200 000 000: cases of law violation will have to be registered daily, because this is how much traffic is routed from Belarus to foreign websites every day.
Combining this with very low buying ability, is the market attractive enough to even bother creating Twitter.by or LiveJournal.by? Or will Belarusians be limited to browsing their 43 000 .by domains?
The purpose of the law if, I suppose, is to attract more money into the country. Instead of buying products from abroad, Belarusians are now supposed to buy from the same Russian or European companies, but only those with physical offices inside the country. By this, money stays in the country -> Good for the economy. Will it work? I am not an economist and I won’t judge.
The officials of Belarus, after massive press pick up of these news, clarified: they do not restrict access to foreign resources for Belarusian citizens. Nether they forbid the citizens sell their goods and services on foreign resources. The restrictions apply to businesses operating on Belarusian territory via foreign sites. And that means what? Will an affiliate selling leads to Amazon.com be punished? Will ISP selling Internet access to this affiliate be punished?
These news gave me a strange feeling. We used to be one country, and now, at the same time as Russia becomes the largest Internet market in Europe and takes pride for it, this kind of laws emerge in Belarus. Of course, the access is not restricted for citizens, but where is a guarantee that mail.ru and Odnoklassniki, Facebook and Twitter won’t pull out from the country?
* Data sources for statistics: InterFax Belarus, MobWiki.ru
Although it has not been officially confirmed, the rumors about a new product of Mail.ru Group leaked and appeared in Russian pressyesterday. According to Kommersant.ru, Mail.ru Group, an owner or part owner of major Russian social networks, is working on creating their own microblogging service.
Twitter has been growing rapidly in Russia, engaging more and more people month over month. According to the latest Yandex report, Twitter had over 1 million Russian accounts by June 2011.
Mail.ru has a good user base (the group owns one of a major Russian social networks Odnoklassniki.ru, 39,9% of another one – vKontakte, as well as instant messenger ICQ, the most popular in Russia free email service and its own search engine), and the plan is to display the “mail.ru tweets” across all platforms, so I do think there is a possibility the Russian twitter can fly, if forced.
The experts agree that this new microblogging service has a chance to gain some market share, however it is hard to say how big it will become. Many believe that the key to conquering the Russian market is being local and this being the reason for Yandex and vKontakte winning over Google and Facebook. This can be the case, of course. Another reason for this phenomenon could be that Yandex and vKotakte came first, and it is difficult to convince people switching to another product, which is essentially the same as the one they are using now..
Mobile has been a hot topic in the Western Internet marketing circles for the last few years, and although it is still in a very immature state, there is a lot of room to play. ComScore reported that in the US 7% of digital traffic comes from mobile devices, and this percentage will only increase.
In Russia the situation is rather different. TNS Gallup Web-Index in their report showed that only 1% of Russian population uses mobile Internet. This is astonishingly low number! According to the same report:
55% of all mobile Internet users in Russia, and 42% in Moscow, surf with old-school feature phones.
Only 3% of Russians (7% of Moscow’s population) use tablets.
25% of mobile Internet users admitted that the only purpose of connecting to the Internet from their phones is reading/ sending emails.
There are also more optimistic assessments, where mobile web users’ figures reach 15-20 million.
These low numbers of Russian mobile Internet users probably explain the lack of platforms for Mobile advertizing. Even Yandex, known for their innovative and insightful nature as a company, does not prioritize mobile just yet. I bet, however, they are looking into that direction, as I’ve seen a number of job listings in Yandex Mobile Portal repeatedly appearing online.
One of the largest mobile operator MTS predicts strong growth in mobile ad spendings during the coming years. According to their “realistic” forecast, the value of Russian mobile advertizing market will reach 2,85 billion Russian rubles (6,62 million Euro) by 2013, which is still not much comparing to 687 billion Euro online spend in 2010.
Generally search in Russia is dominated by Yandex (65% market share). Currently there is no possibility to target mobile devices with any kind of Yandex ads.
Google provides the possibilities to target mobile devices in Russia, just like everywhere else. I am very doubtful about volumes they can deliver at this point though.
However, as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, Yandex recently released search engine for mobile apps. There is no advertizing program there yet, but the rumors say that it might happen already next year.
While Western world is buzzing about search and in-app ads, the most common form of Russian mobile advertizing is SMS and MMS. All major mobile operators (e.g. MTS, Beeline, TELE2) offer this possibility, with targeting options. Average cost of one SMS varies between 1,5 – 3 RUR (3-7 Euro cents).
In-app advertizing is pretty much non-existent. There are several pioneering companies working in this direction.
To conclude, at the moment mobile marketing in Russia is limited to SMS / MMS campaigns, and will probably not explode as it has in the West for another 2-3 years. Russian market, however, is very big, and mobile marketing spend increases slowly, but steadily. Ilya Segalovich, Yandex CTO, said in one of his recent interviews that Yandex “will have to join the mobile race”. And if Yandex does, mobile will be big.
I believe in early adoption. The ones who begin to focus on Russian mobile marketing today will be much ahead of the others, when the time comes.
Today forums and other social media were buzzing with the news concerning Russian domains .RU and .РФ (TLD that stands for Russian Federation in Cyrillic letters; later .RF). Apparently, the rule introduced in spring 2010, requiring that every domain registrar / owner must submit a copy of a valid passport to identify himself/ herself.
The introduction of this rule provoked a lot of angry conversations in SEO forums, and made life difficult for the non-Russian-speaking individuals owning or intending to purchase a .RU or .RF domains.
Interestingly, .RF domains, while being a hot topic of discussion for several months, never gained popularity in Russia. The press reported that in June 2011 there were around 850 000 registered .РФ domains and 3,3 million .RU domains, however one hardly ever sees any websites in .Rf (apart from http://президент.рф/ meaning president.ru)
Popular explanations of this fact, among the others, are:
a) Having .RF domain is not great for the companies planning or considering expanding the business to countries outside former USSR, where no one can read Cyrillic and no one has Cyrillic keyboard, which will make it impossible to type in the domain or conduct email correspondence.
b) Some people reported problems with indexing of .RF domains by various search engines, such as Mail.ru and Yahoo.
c) Not all CMS support Cyrillic domains correctly.
Although for a Russian-speaking user .RF domain (or any Cyrillic domain really) is more memorable, technically it is more difficult to maintain it. The common practice among the Russian businesses is to SEO .RU domains and make sites .RF mirrors of .RU sites. Then .RF domains are used for marketing and branding, while .RU domains stay preferable for search engines.
Last time I was covering a Yandex ranking algorithm was back in 2009, when Yandex search team released Snezhinsk. Since then there were 2 more versions of the algorithm: Obninsk and the latest one, Krasnodar.
Each version on the algorithm made SEO more and more complex, while every new algo was aiming to improve a certain area of search. Obninsk was rolled out in September 2010 in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia and was mainly aiming to improve search results for geo-independent queries. Yandex claimed the search results became 70% better (whatever that means).
10 days after Obninsk Yandex announced a number of changes in the ranking formula aiming at de-valuing if “SEO-links”.
In December the changes were implemented for geo-dependent queries.
A bit later in December came Krasnodar, the latest version of Yandex ranking algorithm. The technology behind it is called Spektr (in Russian) and the goal of it is to guess users’ intention.
Yandex claims that 20% of all their search queries are not clearly formulated, e.g. a query like “sushi” does not explain if the user if trying to find a sushi restaurant or a recipe; or a query like Pushkin could mean that the user is looking for information about the Russian poet called Pushkin or the city called Pushkin in honor of the poet.
Spektr is a technology that analyzes search queries and divides them into categories, then selecting the most popular categories and giving them more exposure in the SERPs. At the moment Spectr has around 60 categories and is expanding itself. Yandex runs this analysis several times a week to keep the categories and their content fresh.
Spektr incorporates information from various dictionaries, directories and encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, to be aware of different meanings of words.
I find the development of the Internet in Russia very interesting to monitor. The market is huge and continues to grow, however the numbers of Internet users do not grow in the same pace as e-commerce. People surf, people are mobile, but do people buy online?
Recently I heard and read a lot of stats about Russian Internet audience. The most general numbers you can find in this presentation, given by Preston Carey of Yandex at SMX Advanced London, which I attended last week. You can see than Internet penetration in Russia is still only 43%. Hard to imagine, right? But don’t get discouraged yet. 43% of the population is approx. 46 million people, which is double the population of Scandinavia, for example.
Another research, presented by Yandex, says that Russian Internet audience grew by 18% in 2010. Most of the growth (5.8 million users) came from the “regions”, which is the Russian definition of everything outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. This can be probably explained by the fact that the prices on fast Internet connection in the “regions” dropped by 30-60%.
E-commerce is growing as well, however, in my opinion, not as fast. You can see the trend: more and more Russian Internet giants are creating their own ad serving platforms. In addition to good old Yandex.Direct, Google Adwords and Begun, Russian internet audience is going to be exposed to targeted ads in all major social networks: vKontakte, Odnoklassniki.ru and MoiMir. The simplest economic principle: if there is demand, the supply will eventually match it.
What I find interesting is the industry data. According to another Russian research agency, the most successful verticals in Russian e-commerce, based on traffic and conversion, are mobile phones, computers & spare parts, and home & kitchen appliances.
The leaders in conversion were Fifty.ru (2,95%), Techhome.ru (2,85%) and Toool.ru (2,53%). I think it is worth looking into the best practices, because, from what I’ve seen, Western best practices do not always work for the Russian Internet audience.
The largest online store in Russia Ozon.ru (sort of Amazon of the Russian Internet) in their presentation at SPBRIF (Internet conference in St. Petersburg) reported the following numbers: 1 000 000 products, 1 000 employees, 
and 4 billion Russian Rubles (approx. $143 000 000) in sales per year.
Ozon.ru claims to have 14 652 000 visitors per month. Surprisingly, the giant of Russian e-commerce has only 0.93% conversion. Another curious fact is something Geno Prussakov, the guru of affiliate industry, twitted from SPBRIF. Apparently 80% of Ozon’s orders are paid for by cash on delivery.
The bottom line of this: preparing to open up an online business in Russia, do not base calculations on volumes. The volumes are there, but buyers might not be just yet. Investigate local payment options, analyze the strongest players in the vertical, and conduct a thorough market research before investing, as Russia is a big, but a very difficult market.
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