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There isn’t a lot of information available about Russian or Yandex SEO written in English.
Russian SEO is a very interesting topic as Google is not the number 1 search engine in Russia, that throne belongs to Yandex.
What is even more interesting is that Yandex has recently made huge changes to the algorithm with less focus on links and more focus on user behaviour and authority.
Could this be a sign of things to come in the English variants of Google?
What Will I Learn?
Who better to teach us about Russian SEO than Russian & Ukrainian speaking Evgeniy Garkaviy from Temi.
This time he is teaching us about Russian SEO & ranking in Yandex!
Yandex is the biggest Russian search engine.
That is why if you want to start an online business in that country, you should focus on Yandex and not on Google.
I do not mean that you should forget about Google but most people use the Russian search engine for searching.
Let me show you some benefits of Yandex in comparison with Google (in Russia):
Last month, I saw this post by Harrison Jones talking about ranking in Yandex.
However in that post Harrison did not mention regions.
When doing SEO for Yandex, you should clearly identify your region. In Russia people usually promote their sites for big cities like Moscow or Saint Petersburg.
Since the country is very, very big it is not easy to find a business that covers Moscow and Vladivostok at the same time. The distance between these two cities is more than 9,000 km.
Take a look at the percentage of people in different regions who use Yandex and Google-
As you can see, more than 70% of people in Moscow use Yandex. In some regions it falls to almost 50%. I used Kaliningrad as an example because its people use both search engines evenly.
For international SEO, there is no point in using Yandex. However, you can use it for Russian speaking countries such as Ukraine, Belarus or Kazakhstan.
Why is region so important? In Google, people from the same country see the same search results for a single keyword except local listings, paid results etc.
When using Yandex, people from different cities see the different search results. It means that if you use the keyword “раскрутка сайта” [in English “website promotion”], you will see different results if you search from Moscow and if you search from Saint Petersburg.
Here is how it looks:
Keyword “раскрутка сайта” in Moscow region-
The same keyword “раскрутка сайта” for the region Saint Petersburg-
As you can see the results above are completely different for the same country.
That is why it is very important to know your region before doing SEO in Yandex.
When searching in Yandex Russians usually type a keyword with + region. For example “ppc services in Moscow” or “buy shoes in Rostov”.
In the end of 2013 the Yandex team at the Moscow conference announced that links will not be a ranking factor for commercial queries.
A new ranking algorithm was launched in 2014, but still Russian SEOs do not have a clear idea about what to do with links.
According to the latest research after removing link influence from ranking factor; 68% of all websites that were analysed dropped in rankings and only 24% showed increase in rankings.
Now this algorithm applied only to Moscow and in some other regions-
Winners:
Losers:
Personally, I think that such changes in algorithm ranking lead directly to increases in Yandex PPC spending.
If you are in a very competitive niche then you definitely must use keyword rich anchors. No anchor links have a very low impact on rankings.
Also, if you are promoting a website in a separate region then it is better to get links related to your region [see the winners above].
One of the most important differences between Google and Yandex is that with Google, new pages/sites in SERP appear or disappear in real time whereas Yandex has 3 types of updates:
Very often your site will drop or increase in rankings following some of those updates. It means that if there were not updates for a few days, then everything remains the same in the search results.
You can track Yandex updates at http://updates.seolib.ru/ or http://seobudget.ru/updates/
Sometimes you can see what happened when your site was dropped from the top 10 and in a few days after an update, reappear in the top 10 again.
So let’s take a look at the right way to optimize your site to rank in Yandex.
As I previously stated Yandex SEO is very similar with SEO for Google. Still there are more very important things that you should know. Site promotion in Yandex is not fast.
If you have a business in Moscow, then you should plan for at least 1 to 2 years before seeing real success.
If you are building a site from scratch and want to be successful in Yandex, then you must know this formula-
Yandex has its own Webmaster Tools very similar to what we have seen in Google Webmaster Tools. It is where you can run into problems if you are not fluent in Russian because the service is completely in Russian and there is no way to change the language.
I recommend hiring a person who is familiar with Yandex Webmaster Tools who can set everything up properly. Yandex Webmaster Tools has almost the same tools that Google Webmaster Tools has such as robots, sitemap, etc.
If you are promoting your site for the Russian market and doing everything correctly then it is possible to get good rankings in both major search engines: Google and Yandex.
Let me show you an example. This site http://www.travelfriendz.com/ru/ is multilingual and not very old.
Their Russian site is ranking very high in yandex.ru and in google.ru for the same keyword “сайт знакомств для путешественников” or “travel dating” in English.
Number 9 in Yandex
And number 3 in Google
If you know in what region you would like to promote your site, then you should do the following:
Yandex loves old resources which is not a big surprise.
However it is more difficult here for a new website to overtake an old site quickly.
So you have to spend time building a trusted resource.
In this field Yandex is even better than Google in identifying Russian content that is not unique.
The language is very difficult and each word has many variations.
Therefore it is very important to discover content that is not unique. Yandex even has an algorithm similar to Google Panda called АГС that is used to filter out low quality content.
Yandex has its own guidelines for webmasters that is available in English and may be quite helpful in certain situations.
If you are looking for exposure in Russia or Ukraine then you definitely want to make your website Yandex SEO friendly.
Gaining good rankings in Yandex is not as easy as it once was.
Until recently, the Yandex SEO algorithm was quite similar to Google’s and was heavily weighted on links and authority of incoming links rather than relevancy.
Yandex recently changed its algorithm in a big way.One of the new changes that upset many webmasters makes it almost impossible for new websites to rank better than established brands.
It seems no matter which search engine you try to optimise for – you are always playing a global game of cat and mouse!
Thanks for reading 🙂
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I wrote a few articles in Russian about SEO in Russia. Yandex is one of the most powerful search engines – you can extract more optimal content than other search engines.
as always, Matthew made another great SEO post that will help us boost our rankings. Keep it up Matt!
Thanks very much Edmon! Hope it helps
Hi, thanks for this great article about Yandex SEO. It’s important, as you’ve showed, the importance of regionality in Yandex algos as one of the main ranking factors in Yandex Serp including among many: regionality of links, part of commercial data and queries which are divided into: geodipendent o geoindipendent ones: https://yandex.com/company/technologies/regions/ .
Thanks Giulio!
Nice article. I will register my website now on yandex.ru webmaster tool. Hope i get some traffic from Russia.
Only one way to find out.
Yandex banned in Ukraine. Now we don’t have problems with that unpredictable SERP, one problem less.
Hahahaha
It is seriously unfair how awesome your website is. Thank you for posting EVERYTHING!
Glad to be of service!
Hi MattThx for the great article. I will work it through a few more times and try it.
Good luck Pit!
İts same way for yandex.com.tr ranking?
But I like speaking to my audience 🙂
Can’t you just disable them?
Thanks very nice article, Yandex browser is one my favorites and also use yandex metrica in conjunction GA (Google Analytics) for more enhanced digital marketing BRs
Thanks for tutorial it’s very informative , but I feel like it mess something e.c Blackhat methods to rank on Yandex . in pas I was getting huge amount of Spam comments with Russian anchors . but now most spams comes in Chines anchors thats give me sign Spam not working that same way in Yandex as with Baidu
I’ve not really paid attention to that, but this blog gets around 40,000 spam comments per day with a mix of languages
so informatives, i’ve just to know this. Yandex is most popular in rusia than google. good job yandex
Good job indeed!
A great article, Yandex and Baidu are two search engines with an incredible potential for those from the West only use Google as the main source of traffic
Yes, but it was just a test! Because my target audience is Brazil 🙂
Not much. But I’ve seen that sites that Google loves are not the Yandex’ favourite ones in many cases. And vice versa.For example, if one wants to buy an aged domain to put some links on it, the domain may give a good link juice in Google eyes, but at the same time it may be close to useless from Yandex’ perspective.
I know russian Matthew, if you need a companion able to speak russian, let me know 😉
Offering paid lessons 🙂 Lol. Since you published this post Matt, I will give you good discount )
Yes, I would like that. But I’m especially interested in other RU networks. I came across more then 10 different networks, which are as large as sape. Do you have experience with some other network, and would you mind to share? I think a lot of people would be interested in some ranking methods which include sape and sape alike links.Anyway, I’m reading your blog regularly for quite sometime, but these are my first comments, so I wanted to say that you are doing really nice job, I enjoy reading most of your posts.Regards!
Great post Evgeniy! One thing you could add to the post (I didn’t spot it so sorry if its actually in there) is that Yandex doesn’t like non Russian content. So if your site is international, it is best to put all non-Russian language content in a subdomain, not a subfolder – e.g. en.domain.ru, nl.domain.ru – this ensures Yandex treats it as a separate site so theres no issues.The TLD is also an important factor, .ru, .rf and .su (soviet union – it still exists online!) are all suitable for Russia – again using one of these is best to avoid any issues.
Well it is true. Thay have English version of search engine but I’m not sure that there are websmasters who use Yandex for English site promotion.
Hey Matt and Evgeniy thanks for sharing these insights.I’m currently only publishing english stuff, but it’s interesting to learn what else goes on. I think this also has given me some ideas I could adopt to my strategy right now.In my opinion it’s important not only to optimize for SEO and publish quality content, but also not to put all my eggs in one basket.Currently I shifted away from the “SEO only” strategy and diversified more – and for me it worked. I got several thousand visitors to my brand new blog without Google and Yahoo and I am sure this would work for russian sites also :-)Anyway, thanks again and keep those great posts coming!
Thanks Philip 🙂 Good luck with your multilingual project!
Well, from my experience I found that Yandex also gives traffic and this traffic is target once who are really interested. Matt what do you think about Sape? It is netwrok from where people buy links from old websites and Russian once. Mostly Russian seo is based on that, according to my information. It is safe when is done carefully. I would like also to know from you what we can use for getting links in Russian websites with high pr and good quality.Thanks for this kind of very useful information
SAPE works very well indeed!
I would recommend you using Miralinks in this way. But there are still many webmasters who use SAPE. After Penguin update many people stopped using it.
Thanks a lot Matthew for this opportunity and for accepting my post. I know that there are not many people who are interesting in Yandex search engine but, as I said in the beginning of the post, There isn’t a lot of information available about Russian SEO written in English.
No thank you indeed 🙂
Evgeniy, Matthew, and all, another good source of information about Yandex and Russian SEO is Anna Oshkalo’s russian search tips blog: http://www.russiansearchtips.com/ it’s very useful!
Hi Matt, I loved it! Have you tried ranking a site on Yandex? If you need content written in Russian which service is best? How to find duplicate Russian content?
If you read the article carefuly, you will see one example of the site that is good in Yandex and in Google at the same time. I do not know about Matt but I was working with Russian sites. 2. There are few very good content writing sites like advego.ru for example. 3. You can find duplicate content is the same way as with English language.
You can use http://www.content-watch.ru/text/ – for duplicate content checkeras for text you can use textbroker.ru
Does that means if Google follow the yandex path SEO will be dead?
Not but its interesting to see an algorithm moving away from backlinks
Yandex is only testing this mode and still majority of websmters in Russia do not know much about SEO without links and me too 🙂
Nice post Matt, thought I would ask you this question here as I wanted an answer from you and thought you would be hanging round here answering comments. GSA or Senuke? Budget no option, I already have both but which one is better in your opinion?ThanksTom.
GSASearchEngineRanker all the way!
Thanks
Nice Article about Yandex SEO almost same like Google. Well I have a question here, Now a days many people creating website in different languages by copying English websites. What they did is find a good SEO optimized website which having content in English and they just convert the English language into rusian, spanish or french….According to their experiences they said that converted website is ranked automatically without any link. Only just copy content. So my question is that is it good to do for earnings from Google Adsence ?
Not sure. It will not be such strong in search engine if you are not working on promotion
Do not afraid russian Yandex, they have very simple (primitive) algorithm compare to Google.Main tactics of russian (Yandex SEO) it’s spam – black hat as you call it. If you ranking good in Google and don’t have stupid mistakes in onpage SEO, you will rank good in Yandex too but – 3-6 month later.Payed links from wibsites that in Yandex Catalog do all job :)Sorry for my english, i’m from Ukraine.
Completely agree with you Дмитрий 🙂 Слава Україні!Not sure that I agree with black hat quote!
Thank you very much for this guide! Just this week I will have to optimize the SEO of a Russian website, I think I will be very helpful! 😉
Good luck!
Now you know a person who will help you with that 🙂
Hey Matt,I was surprised (in a good way) to see your article about Russian SEO. My first language is Russian, so your post was like a piece of ‘sweet home’ in the English-speaking SEO/marketing Internet :)As regards Google vs Yandex, recently I’ve had a very close look at the website that was ranking well in Google in a quite competitive niche. It was on the first page of Russian Google search for several major key phrases and number of long-tail phrases. The site is Google-optimized. At the same time this site barely got any traffic from Yandex. So, without going into a deep analysis, I can say that optimization in Google and Yandex is not the same. At least, it is so for that website.
Wow! Have you ever had a crack at doing something in Yandex?
Thanks Michael, Yes, it is not always that great site in Google will be such great in Yandex. But they are very similar in terms of ranking factors.
Hi Matt.I ‘ve tested the Yandex, but for me the results were very weak.I bet everything on Google because it is the search engine that my target audience uses.Great article.Thanks
Do you take region into consideration?
Do you have Russian site?
I’m a bit disappointed, I taught that this post will be about sape and other Russian networks (especially other RU networks), but anyway, great read.
Would you like a post like that? I can certainly put it together!
First of all thanks for your comment. Yes I have that in plans. But not sure that you should focus on SAPE a lot now. Miralinks is much better and expensive 🙂
Interesting article, time for me to build out an affiliate site in a Russian niche
I wish I speaked Russo 🙁
Right time to try something new 🙂
Another great post. But it raises questions as well. How many people really know Russian as a language. This means that all topics must be translated. Or are many Russians capable of speaking English? Secondly; delivery of the goods. Digital is no problem, but physical products? Thirdly: FTC rules in Russia. In order to do things in Russia you need to understand the regulations over there as well, isn’t it? To me it seems like a new challenge, but at the same time a lot of hassle as well. Or am I mistaken?
Hi Jack, thanks for your feedback. 1. Yes if you are not fluent in English and would like to promote your site for Russian region then you must hire someone who is fluent 🙂 Or at least translate.2. Not sure it is a problem today. I live in Ukraine and it is not a problem for me.3. Almost the same to US, UK rules.
Thanks Mat, but non-russian web sites’ about 95-97% search engine traffic comes from Google. I think we need to focus on Google SEO. Yandex SEO is just waste of time 🙂
Well that depends what you are trying to do and it’s worth noting the direction any major search engine is going in.
Yandex is very important if you want to expand your business in Russia.