Quite often I get a question what TLD is preferable for the Russian market – .RU or .РФ, to which I always reply dot RU, of course. РФ domains, despite a good take off, when they were introduced back in 2010, never managed to become a good alternative to .RU. A lot of individuals and companies purchased domains when they become available, but very few made good use of them.
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, there are very few actual sites on .РФ domains as they did not prove to be useful neither for Yandex SEO nor for businesses. According to statdom.ru (which is the absolute best resource for any kind of information about Russian domain names, by the way), only around 30% of all .RF domains are used for actual sites, and the rest are parked, redirected or return an error.
What’s interesting is that when it comes to .RU domains, 56% of them are in use and only 9,4% are parked. The numbers speak for themselves.
Another interesting fact is that a lot of owners skip renewing their .РФ. On January 1st there were 938 121, but on January 15 the number shrank to 911 922. This means that about 27 000 .РФ domains got canceled in the first 2 weeks of 2012! The cancellation rate had been increasing throughout last year, and according to some analysts (in Russian), if it continues this way, the number of registered .RF domains will shrink by 250 000 by the end of March.
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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Today forums and other social media were buzzing with the news concerning Russian domains .RU and .РФ (TLD that stands for Russian Federation in Cyrillic letters; later .RF). Apparently, the rule introduced in spring 2010, requiring that every domain registrar / owner must submit a copy of a valid passport to identify himself/ herself.
The introduction of this rule provoked a lot of angry conversations in SEO forums, and made life difficult for the non-Russian-speaking individuals owning or intending to purchase a .RU or .RF domains.
Interestingly, .RF domains, while being a hot topic of discussion for several months, never gained popularity in Russia. The press reported that in June 2011 there were around 850 000 registered .РФ domains and 3,3 million .RU domains, however one hardly ever sees any websites in .Rf (apart from http://президент.рф/ meaning president.ru)
Popular explanations of this fact, among the others, are:
a) Having .RF domain is not great for the companies planning or considering expanding the business to countries outside former USSR, where no one can read Cyrillic and no one has Cyrillic keyboard, which will make it impossible to type in the domain or conduct email correspondence.
b) Some people reported problems with indexing of .RF domains by various search engines, such as Mail.ru and Yahoo.
c) Not all CMS support Cyrillic domains correctly.
Although for a Russian-speaking user .RF domain (or any Cyrillic domain really) is more memorable, technically it is more difficult to maintain it. The common practice among the Russian businesses is to SEO .RU domains and make sites .RF mirrors of .RU sites. Then .RF domains are used for marketing and branding, while .RU domains stay preferable for search engines.
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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