All search engines, including Yandex, tell you to create great content. They also tell you that the content should be unique. But what if your content gets re-posted somewhere, and what if that copy-paster ranks higher than you? This situation, I am sure, is familiar to most of us.

Search engines have been pretty good at determining the primary source of content, but sometimes they do get it wrong, and Yandex does more often than Google.

In 2011 Google came up with a way for authors to protect their rights in the SERPs with rel=”author” tag. It has proven to be a very good way to show Google the true ownership of the content as well as build up authority of you as a writer. Unfortunately, Yandex does not support rel=”author” tag. But there is an alternative.

Original Texts tool in Yandex Webmaster

Yandex gives a possibility to claim your content authorship by submitting the texts through a form in Yandex Webmaster tools before publishing them on the site.

The form is placed in Site content section in Webmaster Tools. The section is not translated into English for some reason, but the Original Texts tool can still be accessed from the first item in the list or by following this link http://webmaster.yandex.ru/site/ext_plugins.xml?wizard=api.originals.

In order for the tool to work for you, you need to make sure:

- Your site has a TIC of 10 or higher.

- You content is not shorter than 2000 characters and not longer than 32ooo characters.

- Your content is unique and cannot be found anywhere on the Internet.

- You submit plain text without HTML code.

Although Original Texts tool does not give a 100% guarantee that copied text will not over-rank your original one, in most case it will help Yandex to identify you as an author of the content.

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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Yandex keeps tweaking their advertising products and making them better. In the beginning of the year the company introduced 3 new features to make Yandex.Direct ads more effective.

1. Image ads for Yandex Advertising Network (YAN)

Being used to Google AdWords, I was always missing image ad formats in Yandex content network. Images are so much more appealing; they attract attention and give better impression about the product than boring text links.

Finally, last week Yandex introduced image ads for YAN. They are not exactly banners, but it is a huge improvement.

This week the new ads are being shown and tested on Yandex properties, and will spread over Yandex Advertising Network from 28th of March.

The images can be easily added via Yandex.Direct interface by uploading files from the Internet or computer. The format for the images is very flexible:

- GIF, PNG or JPG file types

- size from 150 to 5000X5000 pixel

- weight up to 10MB

The early adopters reported 60-400% increase in CTR, lower CPC and better ROI. However, the advertisers, who are not satisfied with the performance of image ads, can easily opt out and return to text link ads.

2. Favicons in Yandex.Direct search ads

Until recently Yandex only displayed favicons in organic search results. Now they are also available in Yandex Direct search ads (only for premium positions).

Favicons now are more important than ever. They have to be created with care, and the yellow background of Yandex ads should be taken into consideration.

3. Search ads in the bottom of the page

The “guaranteed” placements ad units (ads on the right side of search results) now can be also shown in the bottom of the page.

This feature has been rolled out for a small number of queries, but the the trials have shown that in a lot of cases moving guaranteed placements to the bottom of the SERP results into better CTR, more clicks and lower CPC.

Yandex shows up to 4 ads in this new placement, and like for ads in the premium placement, displays sitelinks.

All these new features allow advertisers to better utilize Yandex.Direct and get more traffic and leads from existing campaigns.

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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Yandex browser was launched on the 1st of October this year, and, despite it’s far from being a big player in the market, is gaining popularity among Russian users.

While still being far behind the most common browser in Russia Google Chrome, the grows curve of Yandex Browser usage looks pretty good.

Recently Yandex launched a Turkish version of the browser with integrated Yandex services, such as translator, anti-virus, and maps. Just like Google did in Russia, Yandex launched a TV advertizing campaign in Turkey to promote their browser. The main USP, as it looks, is the speed.

Yandex currently holds around 1% market share in Turkey, but plans to become the “second search engine” there, eventually taking control of 20% of the Turkish search market.

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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All of us worked with or at least heard about rich snippets in Google. Rich snippets are great, but since implementation requires some development, a lot of however neglect them. There is always a better way to spend those precious developers’ hours, so the requests for those small pieces of code often end up being pushed in the bottom of backlogs and never makes it to the top. Does is sound familiar? Unfortunately.

When working with Yandex, there are also certain tricks to distinguish site snippet in the SERPs, and they are actually quite easy to implement. In most of cases I list in this article you won’t need developers’ help at all.

1. Title and Meta Description tags

The basis of a great snippet is of course great Title and great Meta Description tags.

The title for Yandex should not exceed 70 characters, including spaces, and contain relevant keywords. Meta Description tag can be around 150-160 characters long and should describe the page content in the best possible way.

When the tags are not written in a good way, Yandex often replaces Titles and Meta Description with snippets of text from the page, or data from DMOZ or Yandex Catalog, which is often not ideal. While there is a possibility to opt out of using DMOZ and YaCa copy, it is difficult to predict what piece of text Yandex will pick up from the page to replace a carelessly written description. In the example below, instead of a could-have-been converting text with great call to action, description contains bread crumbs (poker articles >> poker strategies >> read more) and random text strings:

2. Favicon

Favicon in the SERPs is something special for Yandex. Effective favicon can do a lot to your CTR, but being used to Google’s SERP layout, many webmasters do not take this feature into consideration. For example, compare the 3 search results for “weather in Paris” (погода в париже):

The third result without a favicon does not stand out as much as the other two.

Make sure your favicon is simple and clear, made in bright distinctive colors and stands out comparing to your SERP competitors.

3. Sitelinks

Just like Google, Yandex can display sitelinks in the SERPs. Similarly, sitelinks are generated automatically based on the importance and weight of pages.

Yandex gives webmasters more control over sitelinks for their sites than Google. Using Yandex Webmaster tools, you can remove unwanted sitelinks, and choose the anchor text for each sitelink from several variations offered by Yandex.

4. Capitalization in “display” URL

Yandex allows to change capitalization in longer domain names in order to make them more readable. For example, I could configure that russiansearchtips.com would display as RussianSearchTips.com in Yandex SERP.

Here is another example from online poker industry – both domain names use the capitalization feature:

Capitalization of domain name can be configured through Yandex Webmaster.

5. Social links

Links to social profiles in snippets is one of the newest features introduced by Yandex. In order for the links to your/ your company profiles vKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and YouTube to appear in the snippet, they have to be present on the homepage and linked via Yandex Spravochnik (analog of Google Places) / configured through Yandex Webmaster.

I covered the process for getting social links in Yandex snippets in one of my earlier posts. Please feel free to have a look!

6. Special snippets for businesses

Yandex allows business owners to add a lot of additional information about different types of companies and organizations in their snippets. For example, for a hotel website it is possible to display its star rating, number of rooms and available facilities (in the example below Hotel Beta is displaying the following information through their special snippet: 3 star hotel; 1000 rooms;  restaurant, Internet access, air conditioning and a mini bar):

Currently special snippets are available for 75 types of organizations, such as, for example, restaurants, bars, night clubs, hotels, shopping malls, petrol stations and pharmacies.

This type of snippet is only available for official sites of organizations, and cannot be used by guides or affiliates.

The information for special snippets can be submitted via Yandex Webmaster or via Yandex Spravochnik.

7. Contact information

The contact information (address and phone number) can be displayed in a snippet for an official site of almost any kind of organization, regardless if there is a support for special snippets for its type of business.

The contact information can be submitted via Yandex Webmaster or via Yandex Spravochnik.

8. Product information for retailers

For retailers Yandex can display product information and even prices right in the SERPs. In the example below the snippet displays the price of an item (iPhone 4 32GB) and area available for delivery (Moscow):

Product information in the snippets is displayed automatically for Yandex Market (analog of Google Shopping) advertizers.

For those who does not advertise on Yandex Market, it is possible to submit product information via Yandex Webmaster tools. This way is a little bit more complicated, as the product information needs to be in YML (Yandex market language), which is a special type of XML file supported by Yandex Market. Generating an YML file might require some development, but the results will pay off (especially for stores with competitive prices).

Why care about Yandex snippets?

Apart from the obvious reason that a better snippet will result in better CTR and consequently in more organic traffic, there is another important motive: Yandex gives a lot of weight to so-called “behavioral” factors in the ranking formula, and SERP click-through rate is one of them. Improving snippets and SERP CTR should be high on your agenda, because better snippets will not only bring you more visitors, but also help your site to rank better!

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 one of my posts in the end of last year I was writing about social signals and Yandex SEO. Back then I said that social as such did not affect organic rankings, but I also mentioned that had a feeling that it was about to change. The step towards social was logical for a NASDAQ company, which Yandex is. Google and Bing use social signals in their search algorithm, and Yandex was bound to follow.

Some month ago Yandex started displaying links to social profiles in site snippets in their SERPs. Then it became obvious that something was about to happen, and indeed, just a month later Yandex announced Twitter integration and Search in social networks.

What Yandex social network search is really about

The service, so-called “People Search” went live on February 17. By then Yandex had indexed 250 million social profiles from all popular Russian social networks. Facebook, Twitter and Live Journal provide Yandex with data feeds to power “people search”. Odnoklassniki, vKontakte and Moi Mir @ Mail..ru do not provide the feeds and are being indexed by Yandex bots (hence the information is not updated as quickly as in case with dedicated feeds).

The search algorithm for social profiles in not exactly sophisticated: right now the profiles that have most information rank higher. There is no regional influence in the current version of the algorithm, meaning that, unlike web search, the SERPs will be the same for users in any place in our outside Russia. The parameters for social profile search currently are: name, city, age, education, work.

Let’s try to find Nina Ivanova (a very common Russian name), who lives in Moscow and studies at Moscow State University:

Yandex People Search found 2 profiles matching the parameters: one in Odnoklassniki and one vKontakte.

Searching for my name, I managed to locate my profiles on Twitter and Google+ (the first two results are not me!). It seems like People Search does not take in LinkedIn data, otherwise my profile would have shown up as well, since it is also public.

According to Ilya Segalovich (Yandex CTO), about 4% of all search queries in Yandex are people’s names (or 2% excluding celebrities – which is 2 million per day!).

Having social network search in Russia totally makes sense: while in most Western countries pretty much anyone can be found on Facebook, in Russia there are several popular networks, which makes it more difficult to find and connect with people.

How will this affect Yandex SEO?

Obviously, the data from social networks is extremely valuable, and once getting hold of it, Yandex will use it to its maximum potential.

In his recent interview to Lenta.ru Ilya Segalovich said that social products will appear in Yandex News (similar to Google News service). He also noted that if the information is “liked” and shared, that means it is important, and this gives the whole new way of looking at it (read the new way of ranking it).

Reading the interview, I got a general impression that social signals will mainly be used in ranking fresh content (breaking news, current events etc.). “7-15% of all searches in Yandex are related to fresh information, and more than half of them are somehow affected by social signals,” said Segalovich, and added that a lot of content is produced around the web every minute, but not all of it is interesting to the society. By incorporating social signals Yandex should be able to determine which content people like and want to see, and rank it accordingly.

The pressure is on! SEO-optimized content will no longer be enough for traffic generation. Or what do you think?

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 afternoon Yandex published a press release about their new feature. The catchy title claims that now Yandex “Understands Users’ Search Intentions”, but in reality the new feature is just a different type of search suggestions, referred to as “dialogue-like” in Russian press.

In essence, it is quite similar to Google’s related searches: when a search query is too broad, Yandex will show more specific suggestions.

Compare, for example, searches for “Байкал” (lake Baikal) in Yandex and Google.ru:

Yandex suggests “photos”, “vacation”, “map”, “Wikipedia”, “hotel”.

Google suggests “Baikal photo”, “Baikal tours”, “Baikal weapon”, “vacation on Baikal”, “Baikal gun”, “Baikal Izhevsk”, “Baikal map”, “Baikal vacation”.

So the suggestions from Google and Yandex are very much the same, but Yandex displays them as some sort of navigation (which people will actually use) and Google shows it in the bottom of the SERP (where nobody looks). The feature itself is quite useful 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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Yesterday morning Russian Internet press reported that Yandex and Skype signed an agreement and will begin promoting each others’ services in Russia.

Skype will offer everyone who downloads their PC client to install a browser extension Yandex Bar. Yandex Bar, in exchange, will display Skype account balance and provide an easy way to top up Skype account via Yandex Money. This looks like a good way for Yandex to attract more users and possibly regain the market share that they lost to Google last year. In 2011 Skype showed 40% increase in Russian user base ending the year with 22,4 million registered accounts.

So what does Skype get in return? From what I read today it is very unclear: Skype will be promoted on Yandex sites and properties (which is of course a lot of traffic), but it is not specified how.

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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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.

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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Just a few weeks ago I wrote a post about non-importance of social signals in Yandex SEO. I also concluded my analysis with a thought that sooner or later Yandex will incorporate social into their algorithm, because everything points in that direction.

Last week Yandex made yet another move showing that they do not ignore the importance of presence in social media: they started to show links to social media profiles in page snippets:

Links to social profiles in snippets (Yandex)

According to the first observations, the links to social profiles appear only in snippets for homepages and display links only to profiles on Facebook, vKontakte, Twitter and LiveJournal. In order to get these links in your snippet, the social profiles need to be linked from your website.

Yandex spokesman told SearchEnglies.ru that social profiles are becoming an important part of any company, therefore Yandex will be displaying links to various social media sites to give their users the most complete information about a product/company.

Currently snippets with social medial links are only available for certain verticals (gifts and travel among others), but Yandex promised to add them to a larger variety of sites in the nearest future.

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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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.

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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