7 key insights into Russian SEO

With its fast developing economy and exponential Internet usage growth, today’s Russia is a great market to enter. The alphabet is strange and the language is complicated, but hey, that’s not a problem for your translation agency, right?

So you invested some money into translation, put it online, and now what? How do you get the visitors? How do you make them buy from you?

Russia’s online marketing world is totally different from Europe’s. They use vKontakte and Odnoklassniki instead of Facebook, WebMoney instead of PayPal and Yandex instead of Google.

This article will talk about Yandex, a local search engine that holds 65% market share, and about the key differences between Google SEO and SEO for Yandex.

Different algorithms

Yandex took a unique approach to ranking search results. It is probably the only search engine that uses machine learning. The technology, known as MatrixNet, tries to figure out what the users want to see and ranks websites accordingly.

Content, on-site optimization and links are still very important, but logically, trying to give the users the results they want and like, Yandex pays a great deal of attention to behavioral factors (CTR from the SERP, bounce rate, time spent on the site etc.).

These metrics can be easily found in Google Analytics, or any other analytics package. Make sure to allocate some time to analyzing them, and of course, work with usability and content on your site. What’s good for the user, good for SEO!

Different SEO tools

Yandex, just like Google, offers a few SEO tools. The most important ones are:

• Yandex Webmaster (similar to Google Webmaster Tools). This tool is available in English, so it is very easy to use even for non-Russian speakers. The toolkit contains a few essential features, including inbound links data, local search settings, site links etc.
• Yandex Bar. This is a plugin available for IE or Firefox, and generally made for non-techy users to easily access social networks, translate pages, send emails etc. But Yandex Bar is also the easiest way to see TIC, therefore is essential for analyzing competition and evaluating potential link prospects.

TIC instead of Page Rank

TIC is Yandex’s equivalent of Google’s Page Rank. The abbreviation stands for “Thematic Index of Citation”, but the parameter is also known as “Citation Index”. TIC is Yandex’s assessment of website quality within its category, and can vary from 0 to 240 000. What is important to understand about TIC is:

• TIC is site-specific and not page-specific, unlike Page Rank
• TIC is category-specific, i.e. it is only comparable for websites in the same vertical. TIC of 200 can be good for, for example, flash games segment, but is very low for a news resource.

To get an overview of TIC levels in your vertical you can do one of two things: a) check it with the help of Yandex Bar, b) analyze the relevant category in Yandex Catalog (aka. YaCa, something similar to Yahoo Directory). Just search for the major competitors there and YaCa will tell you which category they belong to. Navigate to the category page, and there you go – all the competitors listed and sorted by TIC!

Different type of links

Link building is an effective and necessary SEO technique when working with Yandex, just like with Google. The difference is the kind of links you need. Obviously links have to be from Russian websites, but they also need to have high TIC (Page Rank is not an indicator here; there are plenty of websites with high TIC and low Page Rank, and vice versa).

Most webmasters in Russia buy links through link brokers like Sape.ru, and do it openly. Yandex is aware of that, does not like it, but there is no penalty for bad linking as such. Yandex likes links from old and respected sites. Links from low quality most likely will have no long term effect.

When it comes to anchor texts, Yandex is not much different from Google’s. Variation is important.

Local SERPs

Early in 2009 Yandex started to play with local search. The idea there was to show local listings for each region of Russia. Having a region assigned to your website means that the website is going to rank better in a certain region of the country and poorly in all others. However if you are selling non-geo-specific products, it is possible to avoid regional ties.

You can see the regional ties with the help of Yandex Bar. Normally Yandex tries to assign a region automatically, but if you are not happy with their decision, region can be configured with the help of Yandex Webmaster.

Slower crawlers

Yandex is known for rather slow crawling, especially when it comes to new websites. Consider submitting a sitemap and helping the new pages with links and social media mentions, but be prepared to wait a while to get your site indexed. Google’s crawlers are much faster.

Domain names

The most common top level domain in Russia is .ru, however it is possible to have a Cyrillic domain .РФ (stands for Russian Federation). RU domain is more trusted than .net, .org, or .info. When it comes to .РФ domains, there are very few real sites using those, and hence very little information of their impact on SEO.

It is always a difficult question whether to go for a local top level domain, sub-domain or directory. And the answer is always “It Depends”. RU domain is always preferable, but if you don’t have the budgets to push TLD in each country, it will be wiser to work with the existing website and translate a section of it.

For more information about Yandex, check out Yandex Corporate blog – a good source to follow up on new features, company news and technologies used in Yandex search algorithm.