This document provides an overview of SEO strategies for Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia. It discusses Yandex's history and market share. Key topics covered include on-page SEO best practices for Yandex like optimizing titles, meta descriptions and URLs. Off-page factors like link building, social media optimization and regional SEO are also addressed. The document emphasizes that SEO results on Yandex may take longer than Google, and it is important to focus links from topically relevant Russian domains and user-generated social content.

2. SEO STRATEGIES
September 2012
Ekaterina Nikolaeva, SEO Consultant, KliKKi AB
ekaterina@klikki.net | +46768707794
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3. Agenda
 Introduction to SEs: age, technology, markets
 Audience
 Search quality comparison
 Search Engine Updates
 SEO metrics (PR and INDEX)
 Regionality
 Onpage SEO
 Offpage SEO
 Social Media Optimization
 Yandex SEO Staregies Key Points
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4. http://www.yandex.ru/ and http://www.google.ru/
Informational portal Search engine
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5. Introduction
 Yandex was presented to public as an Search  Google goes life in September 1998
Engine technology in September 1997  Google is the biggest SE, which operates in 49
 Yandex operates in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, countries, including Russia
Belarus, Turkey and Poland  Page Priority rank technology - "PageRank"
 MatrixNet page priority technology
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6. Audience
 Yandex takes leading position
with 61% of the market share
Mail.ru Rambler Other
1% 2%  Audience Google is more
9% Google “advanced” than users of Yandex
28% and Mail.ru.
 Yandex and Google.ru equally
share traffic for IT-topics (Tech-
Yandex Blogs, Internet, PC, Website
61% optimization, etc)
 When it comes to subjects:
entertainment, women's issues,
movies, web-shops and so on,
then Yandex dominates
significantly.
Search engine traffic market share in Russia, February 2012 by www.liveinternet.ru
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7. Search Quality Comparison
Navigational search Quotations search
Spam level
 Search quality is higher in Google.ru!
 Accordingly to Russian SEO specialists,
Yandex has better search quality for users,
that wants to buy something, while Google is
better for other non-commercial queries.
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8. Search Engine Updates
• Search Engine’s updates are
aiming to improve search
quality by lowering rankings of
sites/pages with low-quality
content, duplicate content, link
spam, etc
• There are 2 types of updates:
• Reference updates -
registration of new links
Yandex’s AGS 17 and AGS 30 Google’s Panda and Penguin
• Text updates - upload of new
texts into index
• Types of updates cannot be
identified in Google, but can
be seen in Yandex.
• The slide’s images illustrate
largest updates from Yandex
and Google.
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9. SEO Metrics - PR and Index
 Yandex TIC (thematic index citation)  Google PR (Page Rank)
 measures site popularity  measures page popularity
 calculated as a sum of “weights” of all backlinks,  indicates how many and how important incoming
relevancy of links is crucial links there are to a website
 calculated on a scale from 0 to 10000  calculated on the scale from 0 – 10
 is the same for every page on a website
 differs for each page of a website
 internal linking doesn’t affect the TIC
 internal linking improves PR
 often differs from Google PR
 often differs from Yandex TIC
 Yandex index
 re-calculated 2 times a month for static pages and  Google Index
every 10 min for blog posts  is updated constantly
 differs in number of pages from Google  total amount of pages is not clear
 respects robot.txt restrictions  often ignores robot txt restriction
 shows up to 1000 documents/pages
 often includes different feeds, other irrelevant links
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10. Regionality
Regional SERPs or GEO targeting of Yandex
 Yandex focuses on geographic markets, providing
local search results in more than 1,400 cities.
 It means that SERPs will differ significantly in various
regions for GEO-dependent queries (mostly
commercial queries)
 If the website has regional business, it needs
to be optimized with Regional SEO strategies:
 Setting up regional preference in Yandex Webmaster
Tools
 Registration regional preferences Yandex Catalog
 Use regional subdomains – moscow.domen.ru
 Use regional domains – domen-moscow.ru
 Creation of regional content, etc
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11. Onpage SEO
h-tags, title tag Important Meta Data meta description, title tag
static>dynamic URL structure doesn’t matter
important Regional domains not important
loves Keywords in URLs likes
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12. Onpage SEO
often comes from
difficult to influence SERP snippet
meta description
yes Does optimization of one query influences related queries? no
likes Internal links loves
medium Importance of a single page high
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13. Onpage SEO
high Importance of a whole domain medium
medium Length of a page text long
doesn’t like likes slightly
over optimized texts Text optimization
over optimized texts
high Importance of the site age medium
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14. Onpage SEO
high Importance of the “Site Trust” medium
medium-low Link relation to a site rankings high
variations in primary
Which anchor texts are important?
optimized anchors optimized anchors
high Importance of different link donors medium
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15. Onpage SEO
don’t work well Site wide links work well
important Topic-related link donors not so important
not important, but
important 1st link
landing page text Links location
on the page
relevance is crucial
important regional not important
Regional links
anchors and
regional link donors
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16. Social Media Optimization
 It is not clear how much  “Google +” SEO
influence Social Media has  Google+ is still pretty new
when it comes to website thing, but it seems to work
rankings, however Yandex towards integration of
prefers followings: social signals, which is
 User generated content: extracted from Google+
forums, comment fields, into the search engine
blogs, etc rankings
 Russian Social Media –  Active SM profiles can be
VK.com,Odnoklassniki.com, used to dominate the SERP
Mail.ru results for Branded queries
 Active SM profiles can form
great extra links in the SERP
Snippet for branded queries
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17. Yandex SEO Staregies Key Points
 Logner SEO results expectancy
 It can take up to 1-2 months to get a new page to the top 10
in ranking, even when the competition is low
 Geo targeting and regional SEO
 Links – topical relevance and from Russian/geo domains
 Social Media - importance of user generated content and
Russian SMO
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18. THANK YOU!