This Wednesday Yandex announced [in Russian] that from now on, the font size of texts on mobile web pages is yet another factor added to a new ranking algorithm Vladivostok. To remind us, Vladivostok was rolled out a month ago and takes into account mobile-friendliness of a page in its ranking. Checking texts for mobile optimization is already added to the testing tool in the new version of Yandex.Webmaster:
SEO and SEM for Russian search engines
SEO and SEM for Russian search engines
Meet extended geotargeting feature in Yandex.Direct
Yandex.Direct geotagreting has always been a lot less sophisticated in comparison to Google AdWords. While AdWords provides possibilities to target locations as precise as a radius around specific city or even metro area or a ZIP code, in Yandex.Direct we can only target people living in a specific region and/or in main large cities in Russia.
Until now Yandex.Direct did not officially support targeting based on search intent, however their machine learning technology MatrixNet took care of that to some extent.
I summarized the available geotargeting options of both AdWords and Yandex.Direct in one of my earlier posts:
State-owned Russian search engine Sputnik joins Yandex advertising network
The newest Russian search engine Sputnik was launched in spring 2014 by state-owned telecommunication company Rostelecom. According to the creators of the search engines, Sputnik’s search algorithm is oriented towards providing users with “social rather than commercial services”, like finding medicines in the nearby pharmacy or times available in local movie theatres. Sputnik is Rostelecom’s attempt to keep up with the growing Internet usage in Russia as well as to uncover potential for new revenue streams.
The search engine did not make any sizeable monetization efforts until last week, when Sputnik became a part of Yandex Advertising Network (YAN).
Russia reaches 84 million Internet users and 70.4% Internet penetration in 2015
Russian Internet audience has been growing very rapidly for the last decade. In 2014 Russian online population reached 80 million users, and increased by another 4 million during 2015, reports Gfk [in Russian] in their recent research.
Internet penetration in Russia also became higher during 2015. Now 70.4% of people of 16+ age are Internet users.
Types of advertising that annoy Russian consumers the most
The Russian Institute of Modern Media MOMRI conducted a nationwide survey the goal of which was to understand the attitudes of Russian consumers towards advertising, reports Vedomosti [in Russian].
One of the main findings of the survey was that 40% of the population living in cities with more than 100 000 inhabitants generally trust advertising and promotional messages.
6% of respondents said that they do not mind and sometimes even like advertising.
