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”.

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!

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.

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.

When working with Google all we have is Google search volumes, which are often far far away from the real numbers, and the old AOL click distribution model. When it comes to Russian search engines (Yandex, Google, Mail.ru, Rambler), more reliable statistics is available. First of all, Yandex shows actual search volumes for keywords on a monthly basis (only broad match though). Second, there is this fabulous click distribution model I am going to write about.

I heard about this method of estimating Yandex keyword traffic at the Optimization.ru conference in November 2009, but never got to use it until now. I was very impressed, because the results were quite close to the reality.

The traffic estimation method is based on statistics, provided by Liveinternet.ru. Liveinternet.ru is a web counter, which happens to be installed on around 70% of Russian websites. While individual stats are hidden, you can see how many clicks all sites with Liveinternet counter installed receive for a certain keyword on aggregated level. The stats are daily, hence the fluctuations are quite big from day to day, but taking an average values will give you good insights.

Liveinternet counter icon. Usually located in a footer.

One important thing to know: if you are coming from IP outside Russia, you will be automatically redirected to the English page of Liveinternet, which does not have the same features as the Russian one. If you want to use Liveinternet for traffic estimation, switch to the  Russian version (in the top right corner). The Russian interface will look like this:

Russian version of Liveinternet.ru start page

This is not all. Liveinternet also made public their click distribution model. The distribution shows percentages of clicks in total Liveinternet traffic, which websites receive depending on position is SERP. Please note, that the percentages are not CTR from the SERPs and not related to Yandex search volumes in any way.

The Liveinternet distribution looks as follows:

• Position 1 – 12-25%
• Position 2 – 8-20%
• Position 3 – 6-16%
• Position 4 – 5-12%
• Position 5 – 4-12%
• Position 6 – 4-10%
• Position 7 – 3-8%
• Position 8 – 3-6%
• Position 9 – 2-5%
• Position 10 – 1-4%

Example of traffic estimation based on Liveinternet data and click distribution model

Keyword:  дешевые джинсы (cheap jeans). Liveinternet returns the following graphs:

Liveinternet daily click statistics and break down by search engine

Liveinternet statistics shows that “cheap jeans” receives 150 clicks per day on average -> 4500 clicks per month on average. This includes all search engines traffic, ant the traffic is broken down  search engine, which is quite interesting as well.

According to the model, if a website ranks nr 1 for “cheap jeans”, it will receive up to 1125 clicks per month for this keyword. Funny enough, googlers seems to search for cheap jeans more that Yandex users

This used to be the case with Google before as well, but it is still happening in Yandex. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, every 2 weeks or so Yandex rolls out a big update and the SERPs change noticeably within 1-2 days. Compare the bars on the graph (vertical axis indicates percentage of change in the SERPs):

I would like to introduce you to a great tool to monitor these Yandex updates – Update Analyzer (available in English!). The tool was developed by the biggest Russian SEO company Ashmanov and Partners, which is also famous for organizing of  the main Russian SEO conference Optimization.ru and a big SEM event eTarget.

The tool monitors and quantifies a number of parameters across all search engines used by Russian people, including even smaller ones, such as GoGo and Aport. While I have never figured out how to use Spam level or SEO-pressing, I use the SERP udate analyzer for Yandex on a regular basis.

Keep in mind that during the SERP update sites tend to disappear and reappear in the SERPs. If a strong competitor or yourself is missing from the search results, it is very likely a Yandex SERP update is in progress. Do not freak out. The update takes 1-2 days and after that the SERPs come back to normal. I recommend to check the updates stats every now and then to avoid such stressful situations!

Enjoy!

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.

Have to tell you guys from the beginning that none of my clients was even penalized or banned from Yandex. I had problems with particular pages a couple of times, but never with an entire website. But since it is an important thing to know and I get many questions related to Yandex penalties, I will write about the most common cases, which my fellow webmasters have been facing.

In my personal opinion, if your website is relatively old (3-4 years) and full of good content, it is very hard to get penalized by Yandex. After the recent changes in its search algorithm, Yandex started to push up brands and big highly trusted sites and at the same time newly born websites get into trouble much more than before.

Here is the list of the most common Yandex search filters. Please feel free to add more to the list!

- AGS-30 (or older version AGS-17)
Automated filter against bad quality websites (mostly applied to websites created for selling links without any value to Internet users).  When this filter is applied, most of the pages of the site get banned from Yandex (according to the SEO community about 10 pages are usually left).

The name of this filter comes from a Russian machine gun, which looks like this =)

Existence of this filter was announced by Yandex itself on their corporate blog.

- Link spam
Penalty for selling link. Can be applied to a single link (i.e. links are discarded and do not pass any value), single page (page is banned from Yandex) or the whole site (the whole site banned from Yandex).

- Keyword stuffing
Extremely high keyword density. Pages get banned from Yandex.

- Malicious java redirects

- Duplicate content

Pages with copied or badly re-written content get banned completely or lowered in the SERPs.

Yandex has been always very good with understanding Russian language and its linguistics. I believe that it is one of the reasons why it is dominating over Google in Russia. Even though Yandex SERPs have been historically easier to manipulate, the search results are in many cases much more relevant that those of Google.

In the last months Yandex started to pay more and more attention to content and its quality. The technology of defining the initial source of content was improved significantly and duplicate content penalty has become much more common. Texts with grammar mistakes will never rank high either.

- Sites with pop-under banners are intentionally lowered in Yandex SERPs and carry less or no value as a link source. This was announced by Yandex in their corporate blog some months ago.

- Too little keyword variation in anchor texts of incoming links can cause a penalization, however Yandex is for the moment much more tolerant than Google.

- Unnatural link growth can cause a penalization, although again, Yandex is much more tolerant to this than Google. However, a link from 40 000 pages from a spammy forum will hurt for sure.

Final note. Yandex massively updates SERPs more or less every second week. During these updates it is quite common that some sites disapper and reappear in the SERPs. Do not panic if this happens. It is very likely the site will come back to the old positions ithin a couple of days, if you have not done anything dodgy..

Right now local results are available for 1250 cities in Russia. This basically means that it is easier (or should I say more possible?) for local businesses to rank in their regions for geo-dependent keywords.  Great! Or.. wait!

What do you do if your site got assigned to a wrong region? What to do if you want to rank in several regions? Or if you don’t want to have any regional ties at all? Here are the answers.

Since a couple of weeks there is an interface for managing your website’s regional settings in Yandex Webmaster tools. Go to additional info -> Region in the left navigation menu.

Change of regional settings in Yandex webmaster tools

If you want to change your region, put in a new one (as shown above). You will also need to provide a proof (a URL where relevant info can be found) that your site really belong to this region. It can be, for example, a Contact Us page with a visiting address.

If you do not want to have any regional ties, just tell Yandex so (as shown on the picture above).

If you would like to be assigned to several regions, it gets more complicated. This can be only done if your site is listed in Yandex catalogue (YaCa). In that case you can select up to 7 relevant regions. To be listed in YaCa is not easy however. It is quite similar to DMOZ (i.e. every site needs to be approved manually and not all applicants get in) with the only difference that YaCa also allows paid listings (still the site needs match certain parameters though).

To do so you need to activate this feature here (being logged in, of course): http://webmaster.yandex.ru/settings/offline_links.xml.

It will take about a week for Yandex to generate a full list of your backlinks. After that the archived file will be available for download.

You get a zipped .txt file, but you can copy everything to Excel with proper division into columns etc. and then analyze and filter as you like.

Very good and useful feature I was happy to discover!