SEO and SEM for Russian search engines
Yandex.Catalog was launched in 2000 and has become a popular source of highly authoritative links in Russian SEO community, similarly to DMOZ in the western SEO world. Earlier this week Yandex announced [in Russian] that the Catalog will be discontinued in the nearest future.
Today at the annual conference for digital marketers Yac/m Yandex introduced a new fantastic type of targeting that is based on advertisers’ first party data. The new service – Yandex.Audience – is similar to Facebooks’s Custom Audiences and Google’s Customer Match solutions, and works for both search and display campaigns in Yandex.Direct.
To be more exact, Yandex.Audience is a solution that allows advertisers to upload their own customer information (phone numbers, emails, and device IDs) and segment these audiences for hyper-targeted advertising, upselling, cross-selling and retention campaigns.
Yandex.Audience also allows creating lookalikes for the uploaded customer segments.
Yandex just announced [in Russian] on their corporate blog for webmasters that the formula used for calculating website Thematic Index of Citation (TIC) was updated yesterday, June 8. Yandex TIC is an equivalent of Google Pagerank, but unlike Pagerank, TIC still gets regular updates and gives quite relicable indication about website’s authority.
The main changes in the TIC calculation formula concern inbound link-based signals, which is in line with the latest changes in Yandex search algorithm. In addition to that, many “outdated” signals were excluded from the formula, writes Yandex, without giving more details.
According to Russian SEO community, the value of TIC has changed for many sites since yesterday. The idea of TIC is still the same though: sites with more authority get higher scores.
Now you can put a “callout” as an additional line in a Yandex PPC ad. According to Yandex, callouts can increase an ad CTR by 3%.
What is a callout? It’s a new feature on a PPC platform Yandex.Direct – short texts in ads which make them stand out in Yandex SERP and attract more visitors to the advertised websites.
Brand Analytics has come up with a new study on active social media users in Russia for winter 2015-2016. We get fresh insights and stats on the user audience, their age, gender and writing behavior on Russia’s social platforms. Let’s see where advertisers will most likely find their Russian customers in 2016!
