Everyone knows that Russia is a very big country. Not everyone knows, however, that Yandex has a very advanced local search technology that is able to deliver local SERPs to all 83 regions of the country.

Yandex started actively working with local search results in 2008-2009 and has been perfecting the formula ever since. In the past I wrote several posts about regional SERPs and how to change the regional affinity in Yandex Webmaster, but haven’t really touched the topic of how to correctly configure regional settings for Yandex SEO from the beginning. This is what this post is about.

Regional settings are important if you work with so-called “geo-dependent” search queries, such as “Italian restaurant”, “flower delivery” and other product and service that can be purchased locally. If you are dealing with geo-independent queries, for example “online games” or “pasta recipes”, no need to worry about regional affinity at all.

According to Yandex’s own recommendations (in Russian) on how to deal with regional settings for websites, the basic actions for the site owner should be:

1.  Provide full company address, including post code, and contact phone numbers, including area code for the relevant region, on the website.

2. Assign the relevant region via Yandex Webmaster and Yandex Spravochnik (Yandex’s product similar to Google Places).

3. If a business operates in several regions, provide full contact information for all regional offices.

Although Yandex does not explicitly advises so, it is always good to submit a website to Yandex Catalog and assign relevant region there as well.

Multi-regional websites

Even though Yandex claims that it is possible to have several regions associated with one website, there seems to be a limit. For example, Yandex Catalog allows only 7 regions to be connected to one listing.

In cases when a company provides services in all (or a large number) of regions, the most common practice is to create directories, subdomains or even separate websites for each of them.

The procedure for assigning region to each directory or subdomain is the same as described above.

Here are some good examples of how large websites handle their regional-specific sections:

1. Region-specific directories

2. Region-specific subdomains

Yandex SEO strategies for multi-regional websites

1. Content

Be as local as possible. Write region-centered content, for example, use “restaurants in Moscow” instead of just “restaurants” in your text copy, try to use local terminology, where applicable.

2. Domains and URLs

No matter how the regional sections are organized (directories, subdomains or separate domains), the name of the region should be present and prominent in the URL. This will help Yandex to classify the site correctly.

Russians often use abbreviations for region/ city names such as “spb” for St. Petersburg, “msk” for Moscow, “nsk” for Novosibirsk. It is fine to use them in directory / domain names; Yandex will understand the meaning.

Good examples:

http://www.kras.mts.ru/?fromgt=1 for targeting Krasnoyarsk

http://pyaterochka.ru/shops/ekaterinburg/ for targeting Ekaterinburg

http://www.tomsk.tele2.ru/ for targeting Tomsk

Bad example:

http://www.sportmaster.ru/store/490/ for targeting Vladivostok

3. Links

Local links are very important when it comes to ranking in regional SERPs. Make sure to register the company in local directories, and make sure than all incoming links you acquire have the right regional affinity.

4. Moscow

The capital is the toughest region for Yandex SEO. Depending on keyword difficulty, you might even want to assign region Moscow to your homepage to be able to match the competition.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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One of my readers asked to explain how Yandex Direct works with geotargeting. Yandex’s PPC solution is not at all as straightforward and user-friendly as Google’s AdWords and can be pretty confusing in the beginning. Once you get used to it though, it is actually quite a good product.

AdWords provides many more options when it comes to campaign settings, including geotargeting possibilities. I will, however, try to make some parallels between the two PPC platforms.

1. How Yandex Direct geotargeting works

To understand how Yandex Direct geotargeting works, it is very important to remember what the PPC campaign structure looks like. Yandex does not support ad groups, so a Direct campaign would be typically structured as follows:

In Yandex Direct geotargeting settings are available on both campaign and ad level, while in AdWords – only on campaign level.

Location-wise, you can target almost any place in the world with your Yandex Direct PPC campaigns. Africa can be only targeted as a whole continent. In Europe, Asia, Americas and Oceania geotargeting is possible on a country level, however not all countries can be included. Middle East and Baltic states are also available as regions.

In CIS (former Soviet Union republics, excluding Russia) geotargeting can be done on a country, region and city level. Country-level targeting is available for all CIS countries; in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine it is possible to target districts inside the countries. City-level geotargeting is available only in Kazakhstan and Ukraine.

In Russia geotargeting can be done on a country, region, district and city level.

2. How to configure geotargeting for Yandex PPC campaigns

First of all, geotargeting can be only configured in the web interface. Although Yandex recently released a desktop application for managing Direct campaigns, it is very basic and does not allow modifying campaigns settings.

When creating a campaign or an ad via Yandex Direct web interface, after specifying keywords, negative keywords and Yandex Catalog categories, Yandex will ask to “select display regions”. That is where you will find all the places you can target with your ads. Just tick the boxes with countries/ regions/ cities you are interested in, and with that it’s all done!

If you need to change geotargeting settings for a campaign, go to the campaign management page. Change Settings option will be in the menu on the left-hand side.

To change geotargeting settings for an ad, click “Edit ad” and adjust the targeting in “Select display regions” field.

Geotargeting in Yandex.Direct  vs. Google AdWords

Generally, as shown in the table below, Google offers more precise geotargeting possibilities than Yandex. When it comes to Russia, however, Google only offers to target regions inside the country, while Yandex allows targeting on a city level.

Google also offers something called “search intent targeting”, which essentially means that if I am searching for “designer handbags UK” sitting in Stockholm, I will be shown ads that target UK-based audience. Yandex does not have similar feature as such, but the machine learning technology MatrixNet that powers both organic and paid results does similar job, without us knowing it.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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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).

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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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.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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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.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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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 =)

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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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”.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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