1. Key Factors for Yandex SEO
The priorities of ranking factors are a
bit different
Indexation isn’t as quick
Local SEO differs greatly
2. Trends in 2015
• In 2015 the amount of powerful link-related factors
in the ranking formula of Yandex became lower
and lower
• Behavioural factors -30%
• Domain age – 25%
• Content quality – 25%
• Links -20%
3. On-site SEO
• Heading tags – very important
• Title tags – very important
• Regional domains – important
• Keywords in URLs – very important
• Internal links – somewhat important
• Importance of single pages – somewhat important
• Importance of whole domain – very important
• Length of content – somewhat important
• Anchor text optimization – not important
• Domain age – very important
• Domain trust – very important
• Importance in link diversity – very important
4. Yandex Quality Guidelines
• Create interesting and useful content
• Put users first, search engines second
• Only place links on your site that will be useful to
users
• Make your site easy to use
• Make sure the keywords you target match your
site’s content, and that the context is correct for
search queries
5. Common reasons for Yandex
SEO penalties and filters
1. Doorways
• Definition: pages and sites, whose primary purpose is
to redirect the user to another website, using links or
redirects.
• Potential penalty: removal from Yandex search results.
2. Cloaking
• Definition: pages and sites that serve different content
to users and search engine bots in order to
manipulate search engine rankings.
• Potential penalty: removal from Yandex search results.
6. 3. Hidden text
• Definition: invisible or hidden texts containing keywords in order to
manipulate search engine rankings.
• Potential penalty: removal from Yandex search results.ъ
4. Low quality content
• Definition: sites that contain duplicate content, machine translated
content, poorly written content as well as any other type of content
that does not create any value for the user. Most often the sites that
are affected by this type of filter are created solely for selling links or
advertisement placements, however in some cases the penalty can
affect real brands / sites that neglected copywriting for too long.
• Generally Yandex is very strict when it comes to content quality
(much more strict than Google.ru), and not surprisingly, content-
relates penalties and filters are the most common when it comes to
Yandex SEO. Multiple versions of AGS penalty – penalty against low
quality sites – have been introduced during the years. The
consequences of the latest versions of AGS can be very harsh, and
the recovery process – time-consuming and expensive.
• Potential penalty: full or partial removal from Yandex search results,
drop in rankings, decrease of TIC (Yandex’s analog of Page Rank).
7. 5. Affiliate sites
• Definition: sites that are created for selling products
and services provided by other sites within their affiliate
programs.
• With exceptions of those few affiliates, who actively work with
content, reviews and social media, most affiliate sites have no
real value to the user in the eyes of Yandex as they do not
produce their own original content and do not provide any
additional services.
• Potential penalty: full or partial removal from Yandex search
results, drop in rankings.
6. Over-optimization
• Definition: text with excessive amount of keywords produced
to manipulate search engine rankings (in other words,
keyword stuffing).
• Potential penalty: full or partial removal from Yandex search
results, drop in rankings.
8. 7. Simulating user actions
• Definition: artificial simulation of user actions to influence website
rankings.
• It is a well-known fact that Yandex gives a lot of weight to so-called
“behavioral factors“. Behavioral factors, such as, for example, SERP CTR,
bounce rate back to the SERPs, average time spent on site etc., are used
by Yandex in order to understand how users react and interact with a
website. High SERP CTR and low bounce rate back to the SERPs tell
Yandex that users find the site interesting, and vice versa.
• Of course, Russian SEO industry quickly adopted to the algorithm
producing multiple tools for artificial inflating of behavioral factors. While
the tools are said to work well, Yandex is getting better and better at
detecting artificial behaviors and punishing the cheaters.
• Potential penalty: full or partial removal from Yandex search results, drop
in rankings.
8. Excessive or intrusive advertising
• Definition: sites that use intrusive advertising formats such as popup,
popunder , clickunder and similar, which prevent users from viewing the
main content of the website as well as advertising with “shocking”
content.
• Potential penalty: drop in rankings.
9. Other things to know
about Yandex
Yandex Indexing
• Yandex’s 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.
Since Yandex’s indexation is slower and the algorithm takes much more
time to rank a piece of content, you will need to focus heavily on
showing long-term results.
Geo-Targeting
• Local SEO for Yandex is highly targeted towards a user’s 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, you’ll 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.
10. AJAX Indexing
• AJAX content is able to be indexed by Yandex, but it
needs to be coded in a certain way for Yandex’s spider
to crawl it effectively. See this guideline for information
on how AJAX content should be implemented.
Social Media and Online Dialogue
• Although the impact of social media signals is unclear
for Yandex SEO, forum posts, comments, and blog posts
seems to help improve SEO performance. Russia also has
a few social media networks that are not popular
outside of the country including: VK, mail.ru,
and Odnoklassniki (OK). As with any social media
network, creating and promoting your content can
result in inbound links and online dialogue about your
brand.
11. MatrixNet & Thematic Index
Citation Score
• MatrixNet is Russia’s page priority algorithm (similar to
PageRank). MatrixNet measures site popularity and the
sum and relevancy of backlinks to determine a thematic
index citation (TIC) score, which plays into MatrixNet.
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 for sites with a score
higher than 10. TIC scores are also influenced by
rationality of content and inbound links.
