Yandex Webmaster tools (also called Yandex Webmaster panel) is a highly useful tool for all Yandex SEOs. It is good. It is free. It is an (surprise! ) almost exact copy of Google Webmaster Tools, hence it won’t take much time to figure out how to use them.

Yandex webmaster tools can be accessed here: http://webmaster.yandex.ru/. To submit your site there just go to “My sites” tab (see the screenshot below) and type in your URL. Then, just like in Google Webmaster Tools, Yandex will need to verify your site and will ask you to create a .txt file on the server or add a Meta tag to your index page. Verification goes usually very quickly. Most of my sites got verified within an hour.

How to add Yandex Webmaster Tools

Now, you are verified. What can you use Google Webmaster panel for?

1. General info: pages in the index, yandex quotation index (TIC), last date of crawling the site.

2. Structure of the website in the eyes of Yandex.

3. You can submit your sitemap.

4. Index information. It includes number of indexed pages on your site, number of links pointing to your site (the number Yandex sees – great info!) and a number of internal links.

Backlink checking interface is not very convenient to use, I have to admit. You can see number of links pointing to your site and number of domains, however there is no easy way to see which domains link to you from more than one page. It does not show the URL of the page your link is place on, but only the URL of the index page. Besides, unlike Google, Yandex does not let you download the full list of your backlinks.

Backlink checking interface in Yandex Webmaster tools

5. Now the fun part – tooolzzz =) What do we have here?

- There is a robots.txt editor. Needless to explain.

- You can tell Yandex to use capital letters when displaying your domain name in the SERPs (e.g. www.SearchEngineOptimization.ru instead of www.searchengineoptimization.ru). This can be applied in case capitalization of these letters will improve user experience.

- Yandex Webmaster Tools provides a possibility to assign the website to a certain region. This option is relatively new. It was introduced after Yandex launched its new search algorithm Arzamas in March 2009 with an ambitious attempt to implement and automize geotargeting.

- There is a possibility to edit site links (or Quick Links as they are called in Yandex). This option is also very new and got some (although rather brief) coverage in the western SEO blogs.

I really like this one, because unlike Google, Yandex gives you certain control over your site links. First, it offers you several options for the anchor text. Second, you can delete a a page from site links if you don’t want it to be there. “Enabling them”, as Search Cowboys wrote, however, is tricky. Yandex gives you about 6 pages it can consider to be your site links. These pages you can enable or disable, that is true. But you cannot enable any page you want in the site links… Too bad =(

The Quick Links are supposed to be updated every week. If you change pages or anchor texts using Yandex Webamster tools, it will be implemented in the next update, so do not panic when your changed do not go live. Just be patient.

Patience you always need when working with Yandex

All in all, Yandex Webmaster panel is a useful tool to have in your SEO package. Go and get’em!

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”.

The basics:

When creating keyword lists for your American, German or French sites, you turn to Google for keyword suggestions. But what do you do in Russia?

Google is not very good with Russian semantics, besides the amount of searchers in Google.ru is not that high. Is Google.ru keyword data reliable? Who is using Google? Can it help to find good keywords to get traffic from Yandex? Well well.. Google keyword suggestion tool is good, however I recommend to use Yandex Keyword tool as a primary source of ideas.

Yandex keyword tool, also known as Wordstat, gives related to your term keywords and monthly search volumes (I presume it is what we know as “broad match” in Google). Unfortunately you cannot enter several keyword phrases at once, so the process of generating keyword list will take a while.

Wordstat - keyword tool of Yandex

Another nice feature of Wordstat is trended search volume data. Yandex shows search trends for specific keywords on weekly and monthly basis.

Wordstat search trends

Speaking about trends I would like to mention another search trend visualization tool “Yandex Interests”. It is a somewhat simplified copy of Google Insights. It shows search trends only for 50 most searched terms in a given months. Kind of useless, but can be fun to play with.

Alternative sources of keyword data:

I really love the SEO Rate service, developed by one of the Russian companies. SEO Rate analyzes visibility of websites across 5 Russian search engines (Yandex, Google, Rambler, Aport and Live) and popularity of search queries.

All sites and queries are divided into 50+ categories. Pick the one you are interested in, look at the top 20 sites related to your topic, analyze their keywords!

Sites with best visibility in "SEO" category

The most searched queries are also interesting to look at, however the categories are quite broad so you will have to filter the keywords extracted from there.

How to switch to "Keyword" mode in SEO Rate

Yandex search suggest:

Yandex search suggestions

Yandex search suggestions are used by approximately 50% of searchers, therefore it is important to monitor those. However, do not rush to optimize your pages for keywords, which you find in search suggestions. The suggestions tend to change rather often.

Now go and try out the tools!

To be continued…