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.

November 23, 2011: just before a series of SEO conferences and events across the Russian speaking space Yandex released yet another version of ranking formula. For now it only affects “commercially oriented queries” (read SERPs for e-commerce sites) in Moscow region, but seeing the past developments with Google I believe I can make some bold assumptions about where Yandex is heading.

New Ranking Formula for e-commerce websites

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, Yandex claims to understand and use site usability as a ranking signal. The new ranking formula takes it even further. According to their official statement (in Russian), the new ranking signals that are added are:

Trust towards the company’s website: well-known brand, contact information, customer reviews.

Design and usability: quality descriptions and images, product search, ratings, customer reviews, simple registration form.

Broad assortment: good selection of products.

Price: prices have to be set at a “fair” level.

Payment and delivery options: several payment options, various delivery options as well as “quick and cheap” delivery.

The new ranking algorithm was explained further at Optimization.ru SEO conference by Alexander Sadovskiy, who is sort of Matt Cutts of Yandex.

Alexander Sadovskiy at Optimization.ru (image credit to SearchEngines.ru)

Sadovskiy said both online and offline components are important for “trust” from a user point of view.  Yandex tries to give the users the result they are searching for, and therefore both online and offline factors will matter for site evalutation. The following elements of a website are considered to be an indication of a serious retail store:

- Redirect to https when processing payments

- Corporate email (not free mail service provider)

- Landline telephone number, or better several

- Office addresses with specified opening hours, directions to the offices’ location

- Easy access to product pages (within 2 clicks)

- Absence of intrusive advertisement

- Valid HTML code

- Good quality content

Some of these things are quite straightforward and obviously aiming against low quality and non-secure e-commerce sites to improve search quality. But to me it feels like Yandex is doing the same thing as Google did not so long ago.

Implications of the new algorithm for Yandex SEO for e-commerce sites

I find these new requirements mainly good for overall search quality. Great to hear that dodgy and phishing sites will not rank as easily and online shopping in Russia will be more secure.

I also some trends similar to Google’s previous changes:

1. Better rankings for strong brands.

The last couple of years Google obviously favors strong brands in its search results. It seems to me that Yandex starts doing exactly the same thing. It is already very difficult to rank new sites. Now I believe it will be more difficult to rank sites of small and medium size businesses, affiliate sites and any other kind of businesses that solely rely on SEO.

Among other reasons, search engines push brands in their search results, because they are more “trusted” by general audience and are less likely to do shady things when it comes to both selling products and SEO. This change will also force a lot of companies to buy Yandex.Direct ads after losing SEO traffic due to this algorithm change.

2. Importance of user-generated content.

The importance of user-generated content is not new to Yandex. Although it was not officially stated anywhere, I saw a positive effect of having corporate blogs and forums on indexing speed and overall rankings in some verticals. Now customer reviews will be a powerful ranking signal for e-commerce sites.

3. Importance of Yandex Market.

After following the Russian SEO conferences in held November-December this year, it seems that customer reviews from Yandex Market* will be regarded as an SEO ranking signal.

* Yandex Market is an analog of Google Shopping. It works practically the same way, apart from the fact that clicks are not free.

This new part of Yandex ranking algorithm will eventually attract more e-com sites into Yandex Market. Again, looks like it’s better for the user and at the same time Yandex benefits from it, financially.

Another thing that tells me that Market will play a more important role in Yandex SEO is that the new ranking formula includes “fair” product prices. It is, of course possible, that Yandex will index and compare all prices across all stores and product lines, but to me it seems more likely that the judgment of “fairness” of the price will be based on the data Yandex receives from the retailers advertizing on Yandex Market.

 Yandex SEO in 2012

I believe that Yandex SEO as we know it today, will not exist by the end of 2012. SEO for Yandex is becoming very complex.

It won’t be enough to write an optimized copy and buy a few links on SAPE. SEO specialist has to think about customer’s needs to create the right type of content, understand customer’s preferences and surfing patterns to improve behavioral metrics.

To successfully rank in Yandex in 2012 it will be necessary to build quality sites, work on user interface and usability, create brand awareness and have a strong presence in social media. Basically, working with Yandex SEO is becoming very similar to working with SEO for Google.com.

I also believe that SEO for Yandex will become more integrated into companies’ marketing and there will be more interdependency between SEO, PPC, PR and Social.

I never really focused on writing about Meta tags for Yandex in this blog, mainly because it seemed just too obvious to me. Now, however, Yandex has implemented a change, which is totally worth mentioning!

Which Meta tags matter in Yandex SEO

We all know that Google and Bing do not pay attention to Meta keywords and Meta description tags, while Meta description is still very important for catching searcher’s attention in busy SERPs. Yandex however never, from what I know, made any public statements with regards to these tags.

In Yandex Webmaster Help they state the following:

Yandex robot takes into account the content of the following tags:

<Meta name=”Keywords” content=”…”/> — may be taken into account when the robot determines if a page matches a search query;
<Meta name=”Description” content=”…”/> — contents of this tag may be used in snippets (site descriptions that appear on the search result page);

Seeing this one can assume that Meta keywords and Meta description play a role in Yandex SEO, but how important are they?

Yandex and Title tag

It is a must to have a well-written title containing keywords. Yandex uses title tags in their ranking algorithm. Very important part of your on-site optimization strategy.

Yandex and Meta Description Tag

The influence of Meta description tag on site rankings is quite unclear. Very often Yandex prefers making up its own snippets instead of the Meta description you specify. From my personal observation, well-written Meta description summarizing the page and containing main keywords has a good chance to appear as a snippet in search listings and therefore should not be ignored. Just like with Google, treat it as a field where you communicate the benefits of visiting your page.

Put time into writing good Meta descriptions for your pages. This probably won’t directly affect your rankings, but can help to increase CTR. Mind that behavioral factors are a part of Yandex ranking formula, so obviously higher CTR = better behavioral factor = better position!

Yandex and Meta Keywords tag

Same as with Meta description tag, I never noticed strong correlation between including Meta keywords and improving rankings on Yandex. If you analyze a SERP for any search term, I bet you will find all sorts of approaches to Meta keywords from stuffing it with all possible keywords to completely ignoring them.

I recommend to optimize Meta keywords, just to indicate that the page is relevant, and will do so as long as Yandex does not confirm that it ignores Meta keywords the same way Google does.

The change

As Yandex reported earlier this week, they changed their approach to creating page snippets. Before snippet headlines were selected based on what was included in the title tag. Now, if Yandex finds the information in your Title tag irrelevant (i.e. not containing the keywords relevant to the search query) the snippet will be constructed from Meta description and headings or other parts of text copy on the landing page.

This announcement received very mixed reactions from the Russian SEO community. According to one of the industry experts interviewed by SearchEngines.ru, most of the new snippets look pretty good, however for long tail queries they often make very little sense.

This change is very important as it directly affects one of the few means we’ve got for improving behavioral factors. The only tip here is to write good Titles and Meta description for all pages and constantly monitor what shows up in your snippets.

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.

I am sure many of you are wondering how it works with match types in Yandex. They do not provide a description in their Yandex.Direct help topics, and there is no possibility to choose a match type in Yandex Wordstat keyword tool. It took me a while to figure it out as well, and here is my understanding of the whole match type system.

1. The matching option that comes by default

This is important for both interested in Yandex SEO and Yandex.Direct PPC. What Wordstat keyword tool returns as search volumes is probably the closest to what Google would return for a modified broad match.

This means that search volumes in Yandex keyword tool will include impressions for all queries containing all words of your key phrase in any order, in all forms, including plural.

Yandex kyeword tool Wordstat

The prepositions and other stop-words are ignored, like in Microsoft AdCenter, but if you would like to see the search volume for a phrase with a particular preposition, you can use the plus sign in front of it.

Example:

By default search volume for coat with a belt will actually include search volume for both coat with a belt and coat without a belt.

If you are interested in finding out search volumes for phrases containing the term coat with a belt, you would have to enter coat +with a belt into Wordstat keyword tool.

2. Exact match, the Yandex way

It is possible to set keywords on what AdWords specialists would know as exact match by using quotation marks, which is quite confusing since in Google that would indicate phrase match, i.e. the opposite of what it means to Yandex.

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, Russian language has 7 cases, which involves changing the endings for all nouns and adjectives depending on a case. Do not worry about that, because all cases are included into Yandex’s exact match as well as plural forms.

If you wish to only bid on exact match of a plural form, for example, you would need to use an exclamation mark in front of the word.

Exmaple:

Key phrase “cheap sofas” will trigger ads for search queries cheap sofas and cheap sofa.

Key phrase “cheap !sofas” will only trigger ads for the query cheap sofas.

3. Broad match, the Yandex way

There is a possibility to include synonyms, mistypes, transliterated words etc. and all the other stuff that Google would include in their broad match.

This feature is called “other relevant phrases” and needs to be manually activated. It is turned off by default.

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!

Just a few hours ago Yandex announced that next week they will launch yet another version of their search algorithm! This time the change is aiming at eliminating “over-optimized” content, i.e. texts stuffed with keywords and almost unreadable for the end user due to that.

Yandex recommend the webmasters, who intentionally over-optimized their websites’ content in order to improve positions in the search results, to go through the texts and make them more reader-friendly.

Yandex also promise that penalized for “over-optimization” pages will come back to their old positions once the problem is fixed.

SearchEngines.ru in their coverage of the algorithm stated that already last week one could unusually big chnges in Yandex search results, which probably were related to the first roll-out stage:

* SERP updates for Yandex, as well as the other major search engines, can be monitored using Update Analyzer from Analyzethis.ru. Awesome and very useful tool, when working with SEO for Yandex, since, as I wrote in my earlier posts, Yandex is rolling out big updates on a regular basis.

I would like to remind you once again that Yandex is extremely good at understanding Russian language, its grammar and morphology. If you are using auto-translated or auto-generated content on your Russian version of the website (which is unfortunatelly quite common), you’ve got one week to re-write it in a good language

You can test the new algorithm in action on buki.yandex.ru – Yandex’s sandbox open for everyone’s use.

Only recently Google announced support of so-called Authorship Markup, and at the same time Yandex declared a war against content theft.

In Yandex Search Blog they called all webmasters to Alpha-Test the new tool in Yandex Webmaster Tools kit called “Original Texts”. To be able to participate in this test, you need to have a site with TIC of at least 10.

All you need to do to claim your content authorship in WM tools is to

1. Add a module called “Original texts” in “Site Content” tab.

2. Submit your original content into the tool some time BEFORE publishing it online.

This information is supposed to be used by the algorithm to determine (and consequently rank) the original content (however there is no guarantee that it will be used, say Yandex)

The texts/ articles are recommended to be something between 2000 and 3200 characters long.

It’s too early to say if this new technology will help to make the Internet a fairer place Seems like a challenging task in terms or processing times and server capacity, but time will tell, and for now, thank you Yandex!

Some weeks ago I wrote a post about faking user behavor in SERPs becoming a common practice in Russian SEO (and especially SEO for Yandex). Yandex warned that these practices will hurt rather than help, but apparently people did not listen.

Today I read on Vedomosti.ru (one of the major Russian newspapers) that Yandex penalized over 1000 websites for using scripts imitating user behavior in SERPs (being more specific, creating fake searches on ‘Yandex and inflating CTR for selected keywords), as well as website of SEO compnies offering the spammy services (specifically were mentioned the following agencies: RBS (РБС), Megaseo, Perfectseo, Userator, Megaindex). Spokesman of Yandex admittet that the tactics worked and helped the companies to increase their organic rankings on Yandex.

The SEO companies in question deny the fact of using software on their clients’ website and blame dishonest competitors. Yandex say they thought of this possibility and rulled it out after thorough analysis.

My main takeaways from this :

1. Maximizing your SERP CTR should be an important part of your Yandex SEO strategy.

2. Yandex can see seo-links as well as seo-clicks.

3. Still no real penalty for paid links!

Happy optimizing!

In my last post I wrote how important the behavioral factors are for SEO for Yandex. Researching that subject more, I stumbled upon very curious piece of software called “Userator”. This software is supposed to simulate users’ behavior and by that improve your positions in Yandex.

Obviously it is a very spammy thing. Moreover, most probably it is a scam, however one can’t be 100% sure here. Not so long ago Yandex made an official statement (in Russian) that they are aware of these kind of software, consider it being spam and will penalize websites trying to fake CTR and other behavioral factors by using bots. That makes one think that these softwares might actually work, and since Yandex cannot identify which clicks are ”real” and which are ”fake”, they are just trying to scare spammers. Who knows.

The idea of the Userator system is stupid simple. They recruit people, who get paid for installing Userator software on their computers and delivering fake clicks to the sites in the system (done by the software; the owner of the computer has no idea what is happening in the background and can use his/her computer as usually). People get paid for doing nothing = Great! Always works in Russia…

For the clients Userator does the following:

a) Simulates clicks from Yandex/ Google/ Rambler SERPs for desired search queries and ”stays” on the website for a period of time. The length of stay can be configured in the system. This also gave spammers the idea to use Userator to hurt the competitors’ websites by configuring the system to bounce from their pages ranking for the same key terms.

b) Simulates clicks to the client’s website from links on other sites (client’s backlinks), by that ”strengthening” the links and making them more trustworthy. Again, everything here is configurable.

At the moment the Userator thing reports over 6000 client websites (not much) with over 46 000 search queries in use. Clicks are driven to these websites from 2,5k different IPs. The fake users stay on clients’ sites for about 20 minutes on average.

I tried to find reviews or blog entries about using Userator as a part of SEO strategy, but didn’t come across anything sufficient, apart from this happy user, if that was a real user at all (in Russian)…

For all of us these new behavioral factors, unlike links, are something intangible. It is hard to estimate the effect of better CTR and longer average time spent on a site. No one really knows if faking user behavior is worthwhile. I firmly believe it’s useless and will hurt more than help, sooner or later. Quality sites, good content, strong incoming links and usability are the things that are really important for SEO. Having all that, the behavioral factors will come naturally.

Or what do you think?