As I’ve recently had to brush up on my Yandex SEO after not having done any in a while (since the good old says when you could spam your way to the top through buying from certain well known link sellers) I thought I’d pop down a list of points that if anyone else has to dive into Yandex will help them get started. Unlike the stuff on here for interns this post does not explain anything in great detail as it assumes a decent knowledge of SEO for you to fill in the blanks.
• TIC is Yandex’s equivilant of page rank and probably the best way of checking value, unlike Google PR, TIC does actually matter when link building.
• Yandex Meta and Title can be decided by Yandex if they aren’t good enough – Titles usually remain the same. All copy needs to be high quality anything could end up in the serps
• Be really careful with spelling grammar etc, Yandex judges very harshly and is very good at reading Russian.
• Yandex likes internal links in content
• Yandex spider isn’t as sophisticated as Google’s so think about site layout/sitemap etc judge it in the same manner you would have with Google 4 years ago.
• Yandex Catalog and the Mail.ru directory (think Yahoo directory) are worth a punt as they still carries a bit of weight
• User behaviour is MASSIVELY important – CTR especially
• Twitter is likely to be the most important of the social shares, due to deal with Yandex to share info.
• “Site Health” is very important, that includes 404s broken links etc
• Press releases still work in Yandex based on high TIC values of the sites that the links are coming from, you can at the moment still get away with overusing these a little bit. Be careful mind as Yandex tends to not be far behind Google with major updates and sometimes actually beats Google to the punch.
• Be more careful linking out – AGS-30 penalty could catch you, sites that link out too much can be booted from the index, this is talking about outlinking in a spammy way.
• Yandex Hates duplicate content and KW stuffing
• Variation in anchors is important (but Yandex is much more lenient than Google)
• You can’t spam your way to the top of Yandex anymore and haven’t been able to do so for a while. So don’t give in to these ridiculous stereotypes.
• Yandex has a very advanced local system, not really important for iGaming SEO mind
Very basic tips on seo in Russia! I think that many will find it interesting for them to learn more about seo and what opportunities it can offer! Certainly a good starting point and I’d definitely recommend using this article as a base if you’re looking for information on how to seo for Yandex.
Nice that it’s quite up to date to, maybe I’m a little biased, but I think it’s important that you get everything right from the beginning or you may as well build your site again from scratch, but hey I guess that keeps me in a job XD