The latest gossip in Russian Internet circles is that the next step for Yandex after their NASDAQ IPO, successful launch in Turkey and recent partnership with Czech leading search engine Seznam is to launch in Poland. Rumors say that Yandex has already hired a business developer in Poland, with a very impressive track record including companies like Dell and Apple.

Polish Internet audience is estimated to be around 40 million people, where Google holds 97% market share. Entering a market with such strong Google presence might sounds like a strange idea, especially given 2 facts from the recent past:

1. Yandex already made an attempt to enter Polish market back in 2001, but pulled off due to the crisis in .com industry as well as uncertain state of Polish economy.

2. The announcement of international expansion plans Yandex made in summer was very much about entering markets where Google does not have a strong dominant position. The first of these markets was Turkey. Yandex also mentioned Vietnam, Indonesia and Egypt.

So why Poland?

The rumors about Yandex planning an acquisition of Onet.pl (one of the biggest portals in Poland) were circulating in the tech press since summer 2011 (see, for example, Bloomberg report from July). Purchasing of the other major portal Wp.pl also gets mentioned here and there.

Both portals have look and feel of Yahoo!, i.e. publish a lot of categorized content and at the same time have search. Onet.pl search box is currently powered by Google; wp.pl has its own search engine.

In case of this purchase, Yandex will actually claim a big chunk of Polish market right away:

In September 2011 Yandex processed over 3 billion search queries, reports comScore. This allowed Yandex to climb 2 positions up passing South Korean NHN Corporation (Naver) and eBay.

The leader is, obviously, Google with 118 billion queries (globally), followed by Chinese Baidu with 11 billion queries.

Yandex has been showing exceptionally fast growth in both traffic and revenues over the last years. Earlier this year the company raised $1,4 billion in a NASDAQ IPO, and a few months later reported astonishing 93% jump in net income comparing to Q3 of 2010. The company’s value is around $8 billion, which makes it one of the top 25 leading online buisnesses in the world:

Source: http://kpcb.com

Today Yandex search team announced that they implemented support for rel=”canonical”.

The explanation what the canonical element is about says :

“Your website might contain pages with different URLs, but very similar or identical content. For example the same page can be accessible at

www.examplesite.ru/pages?id=2
www.examplesite.ru/blog

with the help of rel=”canonical” you can point which page you prefer to have indexed”.

Reading the advanced help section I also learned that Yandex will NOT support cross-domain canonicalization.

Let me remind you that Google introduced canonical tag in 2009. Yandex started to read “nofollow” attribute and already then promised to implement support for rel=”canonical”. Now we’ve got it!

What one can see here is that Yandex is aiming to comply with global standards, which will make life easier for many SEOs!

Yandex is very different from Google, when it comes to stable rankings and updates of search results. It is very important to keep in mind that while Google SERPs are never 100% stable, in Yandex not many changes happen on a daily basis.

This used to be the case with Google before as well, but it is still happening in Yandex. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, every 2 weeks or so Yandex rolls out a big update and the SERPs change noticeably within 1-2 days. Compare the bars on the graph (vertical axis indicates percentage of change in the SERPs):

I would like to introduce you to a great tool to monitor these Yandex updates – Update Analyzer (available in English!). The tool was developed by the biggest Russian SEO company Ashmanov and Partners, which is also famous for organizing of  the main Russian SEO conference Optimization.ru and a big SEM event eTarget.

The tool monitors and quantifies a number of parameters across all search engines used by Russian people, including even smaller ones, such as GoGo and Aport. While I have never figured out how to use Spam level or SEO-pressing, I use the SERP udate analyzer for Yandex on a regular basis.

Keep in mind that during the SERP update sites tend to disappear and reappear in the SERPs. If a strong competitor or yourself is missing from the search results, it is very likely a Yandex SERP update is in progress. Do not freak out. The update takes 1-2 days and after that the SERPs come back to normal. I recommend to check the updates stats every now and then to avoid such stressful situations!

Enjoy!

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

Amazingly fast, the new search algorithm Snezhinsk went live on Yandex. It was announced today at 19.55 Moscow time on Yandex Webmaster blog (webmaster.ya.ru). Yandex, unlike Google, which promised to wait with Caffeine until after the Christmas break, was not afraid to give a hard time to webmasters and businesses right before winter holidays.

I noticed Snezhinsk SERPs were appearing every now and then earlier this week, which shows that the new algorithm went live earlier in several data centers..

Apparently, there are over 1000 ranking factors now… Looks like Yandex is catching up with Google. Not as kind, but almost as picky =)

I will test and report =) Stay tuned =)

Backlinks of a typical Russian website is a total nightmare. You will probably find lots of spammy directories and social bookmarks. This is how the SEOs in Russia usually begin their SEO efforts to get sites quickly indexed and receive initial PR and Quotation Index.

There are dozens of services and scripts offering to register your site in hundreds of directories (one of the most common is called 1PS). There are also directories working with reciprocal linking. Well well… This seems to work in Russia, and people keep doing it, however linking to all the link farms will lead to penalization for link spam.

My personal opinion: stay away from spammy directories. Might work today, but won’t work tomorrow. Focus on getting into few, but valuable ones, which will give your site trust in the eyes of search engines and searchers, and maybe even some traffic. Here is some to start with:

http://yaca.yandex.ru/ – link directory of Yandex. Being listed there will boost your quotation index and attract visitors (as valued by Yandex as DMOZ by Google).
There are two ways to get it: to pay or not to pay and hope for the best. Paid listing is a matter of days. It costs around $400. Site might however be rejected due to bad quality. YaCa guys are strict! Free listing is a matter of luck. You can apply and wait for several months. They never inform you about their decision.

http://list.mail.ru – link directory of the biggest email service provider and news/ entertainment portal. According to their rules, only charity organizations, educational institutions and such’s sites can be accepted for free. Commercial sites have to pay, but then again, if you pay – you get a direct link in return. Traffic from this directory is almost zero.

http://top100.rambler.ru/top100/ – link directory of Rambler, another local search engine.

I also recommend look for directories in your specific niche.

Bonus : a big list of Russian press-release sites: http://forum.searchengines.ru/showthread.php?t=345469. I just found it in a forum. Haven’t check them yet, but at least some must be good =)

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”.

This is the first post of the series “10+ things to know before you start”.  I decided to create this category because although Yandex works in a similar way to Google, there are several Yandex-specific factors, which you must consider when doing your Yandex SEO.

Quotation index is one of them.

Quotation index is a grade of importance given by Yandex to your website (similar to Google’s PR). It does not affect your rankings, but shows how trusted your site is from Yandex point of view.

The scale of quotation index is very broad. It can vary from 0 to 150 000 =) And there is no correlation with Google PR whatsoever. Good private sites usually have quotation index from 150 till 1000, major newspapers and TV channels’ sites – between 1000 and 10 000.

The easiest way to see quotation index is to install Yandex toolbar (IE: http://bar.yandex.ru/ie/, Firefox: http://bar.yandex.ru/firefox/). The yellow bars show the value of quotation index:

Yandex tool bar

There are several known for sure factors that affect quotation index:

• Number of backlinks of your site
• Trust level of your backlinks (comes with age, good directories listings, backlinks etc.)
• Relevancy of your backlinks (e.g. if you sell refrigerators and get backlinks from flower delivery sites, it will not help to boos your quotation index.. not much, anyway)
• Quotation index of your backlinks
• Quality of your content
• Number and trustworthiness of your external links
• Number of internal links
• Patterns of your link building
• Patterns of your linking to external sources
• Geographic location of your backlinks
• Date of registration in the Yandex directory

These are the factors you have to look at when looking for websites to get links from.

Some additional points to remember:

• High PR does not automatically mean high quotation index and vice versa, however strong trusted sites usually have good parameters in both Google and Yandex!
• Both PR and quotation index can be rather easily artificially inflated. Look for trusted sites rather than for sites with high Google and Yandex parameters!

To be continued…

Being “forced” to work with a number of Russian clients due to my bilingual nature, I have been learning about Russian search during the last two years. I have come to realize that being as wild and confusing as it is, Russian SEO is incredibly fun.

First of all, it is all about Yandex. Yes, Yandex – a local search engine kicking Google’s ass a big time!

Yandex holds a market share of about 60%, makes hundreds millions of dollars in revenue and provides a broad range of online services (such as email accounts, free hosting, PPC advertising network, maps, news, weather, dictionaries, and many others). It is 29^th site in Alexa Top 100. It is default search provider in Russian version of FireFox. It even sells branded souvenirs =) !

It might seem that Yandex is a Google in 2006’s clone (which it is to some extent.. well.. to a large extent, actually), but yet, it is very different.

I find it amazingly interesting. And I want to spread the word. So I’ve started a blog about Russian search engine optimization.

Welcome to RussianSearchTips.com!