In the end of last year Russian SEO society was shaken and excited at the same time by a sudden change or ranking algorithm from Arzamas to Snezhinsk. Snezhinsk came with over 1000 ranking factors and ad a result better spam detection, better dupe content filters and better geo-targeting.

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).

Snezhinsk is a new ranking algorithm of Yandex, named after a city in the Ural mountains

Yes, again.. This week Yandex released for testing its new ranking algorithm. The testing environment is somewhat similar to the Sandbox of Google and can be accessed on buki.yandex.ru.

According to Yandex, the new algorithm will analyze over 1000 variable to position websites in the SERPs. Moreover, they published a paper (in English  – yey!) about how the algorithm works. Having econometrics background, I was still a little confused. SEO community also expressed very skeptical opinions and decided to try and learn instead of looking at complicated formulas.

One of the trusted SEO bloggers noticed that:

-    Trust seems to be even more important now. Top positions are occupied by old sites (NB! Sites, not just old domains!) with high authority.

-    Unique content seems to be obligatory now (just a year ago Yandex had a very bad ability to detect dupe content, which improved greatly with Arzamas, and seems to be even better with Snezhinsk)

-    Old backlinks seem to be more valuable than newly acquired backlinks.. hehe =) not sure how he got to this conclusion, but well.. isn’t that something we always knew?

-    For his projects, positions changed mostly for medium/low volume keywords, while the biggest keywords stayed where they were.

-    He also mentions that Wikipedia ranks lower.

As for me, I am currently running 2 Russian projects: one site is old and trusted; the other one is rather new. For the old site Snezhinsk changed almost nothing, however, we noticed more brands on the top positions in Yandex. Can’t say that Wikipedia doesn’t rank well. For our keywords it actually went up. Damn!

The second site, which doesn’t rank that well yet, went up on geo-independent keywords and disappeared on geo-dependent. Weird! But it seems that quality linkbuilding is finally getting more appreciated.

But all in all, it seems that links, content and age (+ authority) are still the main Yandex ranking factors.

I will follow up on Snezhinsk and keep posting.

This week I got the first client with local ties on Yandex, or to be more precise, it’s region in Yandex Webmaster Tools was “Moscow”… That was unexpected since the client was strictly e-commerce website without any regional contact details, without region in Yandex Catalog … nothing like that. Just hosted in Moscow…Weird.

Hence I had to see how the rankings differ among the regions (which you can do on webmaster.yandex.ru portal – here).

There are only 6 regions available for testing: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, All Russia (all regions in Russia except Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg ), Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

I took 4 sites in the segment:

-    The client site (region Moscow)
-    A competitor with good rankings for many keywords (region Moscow)
-    A competitor with extremely good rankings (no regional ties)
-    A competitor with good rankings for main keywords, but with worse rankings for smaller keywords (no regional ties)

I picked around 20 keywords and checked the local search results in all 7 regional SERPs of Yandex. Here are the main conclusions:
1.       It looks like the positions are generally lower in Moscow than in other regions if the site doesn’t have regional ties. If the site is assigned to Moscow region the rankings in Moscow are slightly better.
2.       It looks like if the site is assigned to Moscow it generally does not rank very well in the Ukraine and Belarus.
3.       It looks like if you rank in Top 10, the difference among regions is very small (+/- 0-3 positions), but if you rank lower than top 10, the difference increases up to 20-30 positions sometimes (no matter if the sites are assigned to a specific region or not)

Today Yandex announced that its new version of local search algorithm Arzamas 1.2 (with all keywords classified into geo-dependent and geo-independent) is now live. I will repeat the testing in the next two weeks to see if it really makes difference….

So, the story about Yandex local search is definitely to be continued.

Soon the new version of the latest Yandex search algorithm Arzamas 1.2 will be released. It is going to be even more geotargeted than already very much geotargeted Arzamas 1.1 =) Yes.. Russia is big and there are many geo entities to target… Last week Yandex opened a beta-version for testing, and that was a great fun!

The trick is Yandex geotargeting in Arzamas 1.2 is based not only on searcher’s location and website/ company region, but also on a type of keyword. Yandex divided all keywords into geo-dependent and geo-independent. It’s not hard to guess that regional SERPs will differ for geo-dependent keywords, while SERPs for geo-independent terms will be the same for the whole country.
Last week On Buki.Yandex.ru there was a possibility to test keywords on geo-dependence. My client’s terms were all geo-independent. Ufff… Fewer headaches for me! But many SEOs noticed that the algorithm’s ability to classify keywords into those two categories is far from perfect.

For example, Vetra from one of the SEO forums shared this:
Geo-dependent: Nokia, Big Dipper
Geo-independent: Sony Ericsson, Small Dipper

Not much logic…

Big Yandex SEO guys also published their testing results. They say that about 30% of keywords became geo-dependent. Mostly they are transactional keywords. Navigational and informational queries stayed independent.

Looks like such words as “buy”, “find” or “order” automatically make a query geo-dependent, even if it is “buy webhosting” or “order website design”, which does not make much sense.

Mentioning a city or a country name also makes a key phrase geo-dependent, even if you search for proverbs like “All roads lead to Rome” or “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.

Hopefully the algorithm will be improved before the release. Will keep posting about this. Very, very interesting summer for Russian search industry =)

In April Yandex launched a new algorithm known as Arzamas these days (Arzamas is a name of a Russian city btw). Apart from many new factors affecting rankings, such as for example duplicate content filter that removed over one million of pages from the index in one night, in the new algorithm was implemented a new geotargeting feature.

Even before it was possible to search among websites that belonged to a specific region by selecting the region manually in advanced search options. Arzamas went further. Arzamas assigns websites to a specific region automatically. How? Haha.. we wish we knew =) Sometimes it gets it all wrong…

The known factors defining a region your site is attached to are:

- location-by-IP data
- domain names
- content-related features: ZIP and area codes on your contact page
- region you assign to the site yourself when registering it in Yandex Directory

Some people speculate that origin of your backlinks has an impact, i.e. if sites from, say, Vladivostok link to you that means your site is also from Vladivostok.

You can easily find out the region a site assigned to with the help of Yandex bar. Just hover over the Quotation Index indicator. Three possible options are available:

Region – Russia. This means the site will rank the same all over the country

Yandex bar: region Russia

Region – unknown. Here it is hard to predict how this will affect your cross-regional rankings. From my experience, you can still see differences among regional SERPs for smaller sites.

Yandex bar: region unknown

Region – (city/ region name). This means your site will rank better in that particular region.

Yandex bar: region assigned

Yandex provides a tool for comparison of regional SERPs: http://webmaster.yandex.ru/wmconsole/compare_regions.xml. Please try it out. The results can surprise you =P

Right now regional SERPs fully function for Moscow and St. Petersburg from what is known officially. Algorithms for the other regions of Russia are to be released later. Yandex claimed that the goal is to distinguish between 50 regions at least.

Please note that when searching in Yandex from Europe/ US the SEPRs are completely messed up. I highly recommend to use a Russian proxy when checking rankings.

And the last note for this post. Today Yandex released a beta version of Arzamas 1.1, which you can test here: http://buki.yandex.ru/. This new algorithm will be used for all Russian regions excluding Moscow, St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg. Apparently if you add &lr=* (* is a code of your region) while searching in this beta version, you can see your regional SERPs. By adding &lr=225 Yandex eta will show SERPs for region “Russia”.