SEO for Yandex

Why Optimize for Yandex?

If you want to target persons within the Russian region, consider this fact: over 60% of people in Russia using the internet preferred Yandex over Google. Although the algorithm used by Yandex is not as high-quality as Google, different things made it suitable for use in Russia. Some of the pros include its similarity to google, less traffic on the platform; it is easier to optimize, and so on.

Yandex provides an excellent platform to be used in indexing Russian content and websites. Moreover, there is a support team that will always reply to queries from customers. Other features that make it stand out are the geotargeting feature, user management feature, domain age filtering, among other features. Security is also top-notch, and manipulating user behaviour might cause a severe punishment from content management.

Yandex Mobile SEO

In Russia, there are over 80 million mobile users. With the current trend, there will be about 93 million as of 2021. Google has been very restrictive on mobile searches in Russia following the roll-out of Google's default OS. This has increased the use of Yandex as a primary search engine by over 70%. Algorithms such as the Vladivostok provided mobile users with a great experience.

• Russia has over 93 million smartphone users
• Yandex has grown in popularity by over 70%

Yandex Locality SEO

Search engines in vast areas such as Russia utilize localized search algorithms. This allows the user to specify the location within which the search is supposed to be conducted. Geotargeting provides an excellent solution to finding the specified SEO content with a specific locality or region. Moreover, you can change your region depending on what content you need. For those working globally, the searches won't have any effect.

Yandex technical SEO

While the similarities between Google and Yandex are evident, there are a set of rules on Yandex that must be considered when creating your Russian site. Some elements are considered to be very important while others are somewhat important. For instance, the most important tags are the header tag, the title tag and the keyword in the URLs. Internal linking and meta keywords are somewhat important.

• Header and title tags are very important
• URL in Russian it better than English
• Internal linking and optimized meta description are more important than in Google

Getting Indexed on Yandex

Google refreshes its content as soon as it is added. Yandex, however, takes time before the content can actually be indexed. To have content posted as part of the site, sitemaps need to be submitted to the Yandex Webmaster. Use XML files to create a sitemap. XML is essential, especially in loading new pages. It improves the load speeds considering hreflangs are not read by crawlers.

What is the difference between Yandex and Google?

Yandex is similar to other search engines, but it works on its own ecosystem and microcosm. It provides a great platform to allow easy search and retrieval of SEO content. There are particular peculiarities such as geolocation and sorting content by age. Yandex developers are working hard to improve the functionality and precision algorithm. They launched an AI that used machine learning to reply to long trail queries.