Some months ago I wrote a post about Yandex and “nofollow” attribute of the <A> tag. Yandex did not, for some obscure reason, read nofollow attribute, so any “nofollowed” link was passing just as much link juice as a direct link in the eyes of Yandex. In order to prevent unwanted links being indexed until now webmasters used tag <noindex> around the piece of code with the link.

Last week however things changed. I did not see any public announcement, but many SEOs noticed that the amount of backlinks in Yandex Webmaster tools dramatically decreased for many websites, and this is because suddenly Yandex started to understand rel=”nofollow”.  A note about that also appeared in Webmaster Help (in Russian).

This will change things for a lot of websites. Forum and blog comments spam, as well as spamming Wikipedia, was very common SEO technique and it worked fairly well in not-so-competitive verticals. SEO forums were full of complaints last week. I find it rather funny. OMG! Now we actually have to work and think to get those good links! =)

All in all, I think Yandex SEO trends follow those of Google, still with a couple of years of delay. The next step towards civilized optimization is going to be taken in the coming months: Yandex announced that they are planning to support rel=”canonical”.

It is a well known trend – people move from searching for keywords to asking questions. The share of keyword questions is increasing every year according to all the major search engines. Last year Wordtracker even introduced a keyword tool dedicated to keyword questions research.

Yandex is not an exception. Accoring to the latest report, 3 out of 100 million searches on Yandex are questions.

About 50% of all questions asked by Yandex audience start with HOW, 17,5% – with WHERE, 8,15% – with WHEN.

Questions can be a great addition to your keyword strategy! While not many people optimize for question, some of them have impressive search volumes!

Unfortunately I have not come across any tool for keyword question research in Russian. The only way top find those great questions is to dig into your own data. Sometimes Yandex Wordstat can give you some hints.

Don’t miss out on a great opportunity to easily get additional traffic to your site!

Interesting interview. Found on the net a couple of days ago. The CEO of Yandex is talking (in English!) abough Yandex and his visions.

My favorite quotes:

• We planned IPO a year ago. Now we don’t need IPO. We have enough money.
• There is much more money available in Russia than brains
• 90% of searches are in Russian
• Pople use Yandex more than Google, because we search better

Not sure how many of you use search operators.. I almost never do =) When it comes to my private life, I am a standard searcher. I google “translate” and “maps”, when I need to use Google Translate or Google Maps. I never use all those Related: or Inurl .. If I don’t find the results on the 1st SERP satisfying, I just change the query. And yet, I consider myself Internet-savvy =)

When it comes to my work, I love search operators! Linkdomain, linkfromdomain… aren’t they sweet? What would we do without them?! Google, Bing and Yahoo provide a great variety of search operators, which can be used for various SEO purposes. What about Yandex? What do you think?

Yandex has a few operators as well. Not many. Some. This is how you use them:

OPERATOR[PARAMETER(S)]

or

OPERATOR=”PARAMETER(S)”

or

KEYWORD  << OPERATOR[PARAMETER(S)] / KEYWORD  << OPERATOR=”PARAMETER(S)”

No structured way of using them.. but what did you expect from Yandex? =)

And here they are:

Title[keyword] – search for a keyword in title tags. Works the same way as Google’s intitle:
Example: title[obama] or Obama << title[biography]

Inurl=”keyword” – works the same way as Google’s Inurl:
Example: inurl=”seo”

Domain=”TLD” – searches for keywords within a certain top level domain
Example:  seo << domain=”by”. This will find you SEO websites from Belarus

Date=”YYYY{*|ММ{*|DD}}” – searches for pages with a specified date.
Example: date=”200310*” – finds random websites from 2003. I tried several rimes to combine it with a keyword, but it did not really work for me. Please let me know if it works for anyone else =)

lang=”ru/uk/be/en/fr/de” – searches for pages written in a certain language. Here RU stands for Russian, UK – for Ukrainian, BE – for Belorussian, EN- for English, FR – for French, DE – for German (these are the only languages you can search for).
Example:  seo << lang=”uk” – finds pages about SEO written in Ukrainian

Mime=”html/pdf/doc/ppt/xls/rtf/swf” – searches for files of a certain type (these are the only file types you can search for)
Example: seo << mime=”ppt” – finds Power Point Presentations about SEO

Cat=(region ID/ Topic ID) – searches sites assigned to a certain region/ certain topic in Yandex Directory.  List of regional codes you can find here: http://search.yaca.yandex.ru/geo.c2n. Topic codes are here: http://search.yaca.yandex.ru/cat.c2n. Pages are in Russian,  but you can use Google Translate =)

There are also several Yandex search operators which I did not really find any use for:

url=”www.url.ru/cat/*” - supposingly searches for a keyword on a specified site (something similar to Site: in Google). This one never worked for me.

host=”www.host.ru” – similar to url=, but searches within one host

rhost=”ru.url.*” or  rhost=”ru.url.www” – similar to host=, but you can use * to search subdomains.

You’ve been probably waiting for some nice SEO search operators for Yandex, right? Well, have to disappoint you. They do not exist. Back in 2007 there were operators Link and Anchor (guess what they did). But Yandex stopped using them due to high spam levels.

Meta tags is an old topic discussed and argued about in hundreds and hundreds of blog posts. We all know that good Meta Title and Meta description can improve click-through rate from the SERPs and help rankings.

Writing Meta tags for Yandex, however, is a bit special. What you need to know is that Yandex only displays your Meta title and not Meta description! Instead of Meta description is pulls a random piece of texts from the ranking page. How Yandex chooses the snippet is a mystery.

Some Russian SEOs speculate that it is usually a piece of text on the page with the highest keyword density that ends up being your Yandex Meta description. I would argue with that. I have seen many times how completely irrelevant words appeared in the snippets (e.g. copyright or year from the footer etc.). Besides, the snippet changes every 1-2 weeks.

Once I met a Yandex representative at some SEO conference, and he told me that Yandex has employees, who manually go through websites and select snippets. He also mentioned that Meta description is too easy to manipulate, and it can mislead their users… Well… =) I wouldn’t trust that one

I also noticed that the quality of snippets vary among segments. That is, if you are in finance or law, your snippet is more likely to make sense than if you are in gambling (yeah.. no search engine likes spam).

The conclusions from all this:
1. Write catchy Meta titles. People will see them and react.
2. Yandex does not display Meta description. Try to display the best information in the title.
3. Make sure all texts on your pages are proper. Write good grammatically correct and selling copy! Remember that any random snippet can end up in SERPs!

I came back from my vacation just a couple of days ago and WOW, what do I see?! Yandex released some services for microblogging! So Russians go social [media]!

First, Russia was announced to be world’s most engaged social networking audience (according to comScore, July 2), now this.

In my previous post about social media in Russia I mentioned that Twitter was not that popular.. Well, seems like it might have a bright future in my motherland after all (half motherland, anyway..)!

So, that is what Yandex has released:

Advanced Blog Search now supports search in microblogs

To select this option and try yet another search engine (this time Russian), go to http://blogs.yandex.ru/advanced.xml and select Search in Microblogs:

How to do Twitter search on Yandex

Did not work for me today as the service was temporary unavailable, but I believe normally it works just fine  =)

Please note, that this search engines goes not only through Twitter, but also through blogs.mail.ru, mblogi.qip.ru, my.ya.ru, juick.com, ljchat.ru, jamango.ru, friendfeed.com, smster.ru and smsnik.com.

Rating of microblogs
Here they list the most popular Twitter users. The first column is Yandex rating, the second – number of followers. Today I saw there were 38 541 Twitter accounts in the rating. Will check in a week and update you on progress =)

Yandex is now on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/yandex – here. I’ve been following it for a while and can’t say Yandex is extremely active. However they post some good links every now and then.
NB! Tweetdeck seems to have problems with displaying Cyrillic characters =( That’s too bad. I love Tweetdeck.

Yandex can read, understand, search and index shortened URLs

…such as , tinyurl.com, bit.ly, clck.ru or twtr.ru (there are even local Russian URL shortening services). I will write a separate post about it.

Cool stuff! =)

Yandex calendar

Looks familiar? Looks like Google Calendar? It is generally very hard to find a feature on Yandex, which Google is missing!

Before you could manage your agenda in Yandex Calendar if you had a Yandex account. Now you can also create shared calendars to show your scheduled events to your friends or business contacts! The new feature was announced yesterday on Yandex company blog.

Very convenient, as we’ve all known for a while =)