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!

One of the most frequently asked questions! Multilingual companies often run into trouble when trying to rank in Yandex with a subdomain or subdirectory of their strong .COM site. I heard this question at SEO conferences and from webmaster community.

So if you face problems with Yandex rankings, while your rankings in Google are great, these things are worth checking:

- Yandex does not like automatic redirects (e.g. if you display a certain language version based on visitor’s IP). Yandex has problems indexing such pages.

- Yandex is slower than Google when it comes to new sites and pages. If for Google it takes 1-2 days to index a new page and show it in SERPs, for Yandex it will take at least 1-2 weeks, and the page will not appear high. It can take up to 1-2 months to get a new page to the top 10, even when the competition is low.

- Google is better with finding and indexing pages, especially when it comes to big sites with complicated linking structure. The situation when Yandex sees 1000 pages of your website and Google sees 2500 is not uncommon.

- Yandex and Google index Flash and Java script in a different way. I have no experience with this, but it is a common knowledge and it can cause ranking problems.

- You choose to create language versions as subdomains or subdirectoris counting that they will receive a lot of strength from the .COM site, right? PR will flow and it will be easier to rank. Right. But your .COM site is not an authority for Yandex (in most cases, anyway). It is not indexed properly, does not have TIC (thematic index of citation), therefore no credit will be received and it will be much harder to get rankings in Yandex then it Google.

- To rank in Yandex you need links from sites in Russian. While backlinks in English might help a German site to rank in Google, in Russia this will not happen. We are dealing with Yandex, a local search engine with a limited ability to index and evaluate foreign sites. So no cheating here! Want Yandex rankings – get Russian links.

There are many more small things that can result in big differences between Google and Yandex rankings. I will be returning to this topic in the coming posts.

Interesting interview. Found on the net a couple of days ago. The CEO of Yandex is talking (in English!) abough Yandex and his visions.

My favorite quotes:

• We planned IPO a year ago. Now we don’t need IPO. We have enough money.
• There is much more money available in Russia than brains
• 90% of searches are in Russian
• Pople use Yandex more than Google, because we search better

Not sure how many of you use search operators.. I almost never do =) When it comes to my private life, I am a standard searcher. I google “translate” and “maps”, when I need to use Google Translate or Google Maps. I never use all those Related: or Inurl .. If I don’t find the results on the 1st SERP satisfying, I just change the query. And yet, I consider myself Internet-savvy =)

When it comes to my work, I love search operators! Linkdomain, linkfromdomain… aren’t they sweet? What would we do without them?! Google, Bing and Yahoo provide a great variety of search operators, which can be used for various SEO purposes. What about Yandex? What do you think?

Yandex has a few operators as well. Not many. Some. This is how you use them:

OPERATOR[PARAMETER(S)]

or

OPERATOR=”PARAMETER(S)”

or

KEYWORD  << OPERATOR[PARAMETER(S)] / KEYWORD  << OPERATOR=”PARAMETER(S)”

No structured way of using them.. but what did you expect from Yandex? =)

And here they are:

Title[keyword] – search for a keyword in title tags. Works the same way as Google’s intitle:
Example: title[obama] or Obama << title[biography]

Inurl=”keyword” – works the same way as Google’s Inurl:
Example: inurl=”seo”

Domain=”TLD” – searches for keywords within a certain top level domain
Example:  seo << domain=”by”. This will find you SEO websites from Belarus

Date=”YYYY{*|ММ{*|DD}}” – searches for pages with a specified date.
Example: date=”200310*” – finds random websites from 2003. I tried several rimes to combine it with a keyword, but it did not really work for me. Please let me know if it works for anyone else =)

lang=”ru/uk/be/en/fr/de” – searches for pages written in a certain language. Here RU stands for Russian, UK – for Ukrainian, BE – for Belorussian, EN- for English, FR – for French, DE – for German (these are the only languages you can search for).
Example:  seo << lang=”uk” – finds pages about SEO written in Ukrainian

Mime=”html/pdf/doc/ppt/xls/rtf/swf” – searches for files of a certain type (these are the only file types you can search for)
Example: seo << mime=”ppt” – finds Power Point Presentations about SEO

Cat=(region ID/ Topic ID) – searches sites assigned to a certain region/ certain topic in Yandex Directory.  List of regional codes you can find here: http://search.yaca.yandex.ru/geo.c2n. Topic codes are here: http://search.yaca.yandex.ru/cat.c2n. Pages are in Russian,  but you can use Google Translate =)

There are also several Yandex search operators which I did not really find any use for:

url=”www.url.ru/cat/*” - supposingly searches for a keyword on a specified site (something similar to Site: in Google). This one never worked for me.

host=”www.host.ru” – similar to url=, but searches within one host

rhost=”ru.url.*” or  rhost=”ru.url.www” – similar to host=, but you can use * to search subdomains.

You’ve been probably waiting for some nice SEO search operators for Yandex, right? Well, have to disappoint you. They do not exist. Back in 2007 there were operators Link and Anchor (guess what they did). But Yandex stopped using them due to high spam levels.

Yandex calendar

Looks familiar? Looks like Google Calendar? It is generally very hard to find a feature on Yandex, which Google is missing!

Before you could manage your agenda in Yandex Calendar if you had a Yandex account. Now you can also create shared calendars to show your scheduled events to your friends or business contacts! The new feature was announced yesterday on Yandex company blog.

Very convenient, as we’ve all known for a while =)