11 Things You Need to Know About Yandex SEO by @hgjones2
Yandex is Russias most popular search engine with a 62% market share, and also has a stronghold in Poland, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Turkey. Google is still a major stakeholder in the Russia market, but if you are marketing in Russia, you should optimize for Yandex first, Google second.
Yandex has several SEO requirements that differ from other search engines, which makes SEO in Russia a different ball game. This also makes Yandexone of the most interesting search engines to optimize for because its different from what SEO professionals tend towork with day-to-day.
Here are 11 things you need to know about SEO for Yandex:
If you work at a company outside of Russia, you probably dont get very many requests for Yandex SEO. Thats because Russia has its own SEO agencies that specialize in Yandex, and most Russian companies do not operate outside of Russia. Because of this, most Russian companies hire agencies within Russia. There is a very good chance you may go your entire career without ever having to optimize a site for Yandex unless you live in Russia or one of its bordering countries.
MatrixNet is Russias page priority algorithm (similar to PageRank). MatrixNet measures site popularityand the sum and relevancy of backlinks to determine a thematic index citation (TIC) score, which plays intoMatrixNet. Rather than scoring on a scale of 0-10 like PageRank,TIC is scored on a scale of 0-10,000. The TIC score is also the same for every page on the website rather than on a page-by-page basis. A TIC score quantifies the importance of a piece of content, which is included in SERPs to help users determine the quality and credibility of the content. A plugin called Yandex Elements will allow you to see the TIC score forsites with a score higher than 10. TIC scores are also influenced by rationality of content and inbound links.
Yandexs index is re-calculated a few times a month for static pages, and several times per day for blog posts, whereas Google constantly crawls and indexes content. Yandex also respects rules set up in robots.txt. Creating a sitemap will also help Yandex index your content quicker.
Local SEO for Yandex is highly targeted towards a users metro area. Local search results are delivered to users in more than 1,400 cities, resulting in users having very different search results depending on where they are in Russia. Of course, this is mostly only true to geo-specific search queries. For companies with regional businesses, youll need to set up regional preferences in Yandex Webmaster Tools, add preferences to Yandex Catalog, and use regional domains or subdomains along with region-specific content.
The on-page factors and what is most important differs greatly from Google. Heres what Yandex looks at, and how much weight they place on each factor:
Unlike Google, how your search listings appear in SERPs isnt quite as easy to influence.
See the original post here:
11 Things You Need to Know About Yandex SEO by @hgjones2