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Differences & Similarities

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Internet usage and Online behaviour in Russia, 2014Population: 143 millionInternet population: 80 million (56%)

Internet usage and Online behaviour in Russia, 2014

Russia Germany France Spain UK

Total population, million 143 81.89 65.7 46.2 63.2

Internet users (% Population) 56% 84% 83% 72% 87%

Time online (hrs per day) 4.8 3.7 4.1 4 4.1

Time on social media (hrs per day) 1.9 1.3 1.7 1.5 1.6

Mobile subscription penetration 184% 133% 109% 118% 130%

“We don’t have Wi-Fi notbecause we are stingy,but because we want you to talk to those who you come with...”

Russian Search Engines Market Share, August 2015

Yandex Google Search.Mail.ruBing Rambler Other

54.0%34.7%

8.6%

2013, search queries in billions

Google: 114.73

Baidu: 14.5

Yahoo: 8.63

Yandex: 5

Yandex = Yet Another Indexer

“Ya / Я” means “I” in Russian

“Yasha” – called by Russians

Search Enginehttps://www.google.ru/

Online Portalhttps://www.yandex.ru/ Mail

ComparisonShoppingWeather

News

MoiKrug - social network aimed at establishing business contacts

Yandex.Catalog - directory sites

Yandex.Direct - automated, auction-based system for placement of text-based advertising

Yandex Disk - cloud storage

Yandex.Fotki - free photo hosting

Yandex.Images - search for images on the web, including search BY image itself

Yandex.Mail - email service that offers unlimited storage

Yandex Maps - maps

Yandex.Market - comparison service characteristics of the goods and their prices

Yandex Metrics - a free service designed to measure websites visits and analysis of user behaviour

Yandex.Money - electronic payment service

Yandex.Music - service that facilitates free searching and legal listening to songs, albums and music tracks collections

Yandex.News - automatic data processing and systematization of the news media of different sources

Yandex.Panoramas - web service allows viewing of the panorama streets of cities in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkey, which is the empowerment of the service Yandex.Maps

Yandex Search - search engine optimization

Yandex.Slovari - service to search for information on sites and encyclopaedic reference content as well as on the basis of digitized by Yandex dictionaries and reference books

Yandex.Taxi - service to match clients to available taxi cabs in Moscow

Yandex.Terra - geological, geophysical and seismic data processing service

Yandex.Translate - online translator

Yandex.Video - search for movies with the ability to view the majority found clips on the search results page

Yandex.Zakladki - project for storing custom bookmarks outside a browser (online)

Yandex Products & Services

Audiences in Russia

is widely used by mostly young people and computer professionals. Many even claim that Google delivers more relevant results on topics related to IT.

appeals to ordinary people who are the primary audience of search engines.

address to the audience of big cities – Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Yandex focuses on all regions.

Yandex is better for Russian language search

Search Results for the Russian Word “ЯБЛОКО” (apple) in Google.ru and Yandex.ru

Search Results for the Russian Word “ЯБЛОКО” (apple) in Google.ru

Apple «Эппл»

In Russia people don’t necessarily associate the Russian word ‘apple’

with the brand, the maker of iPhones/Macs.

What does Yandex have that Google does not have?

Yandex – the only search engine that offers users the option to compare its search engine results for the same search using competitor search engines.

Search Engine Updates

SEO Metrics: PR & TIC

Backlinks• In March 2014, Yandex removed backlinks completely from the ranking algorithm and

reintegrated them a year later. Since then backlinks can, depending on their quality, either benefit or harm your ranking positions. The underlying algorithm is called “Minusinsk” (similar to the Google Penguin algorithm).

• One more important thing to remember is while Google.ru might be able to also find your-site.com backlinks; it is definitely not the same case with Yandex, which even if it finds the links, the .com sites thus also backlinks have lower authority. What you need is actual links from Russian pages.

• The Thematic Index Citation (TIC) score defines a website's relevance on a scale of 0-10'000, based on the quantity and quality of the backlinks (similar to the Google Page Rank).

Index power• Yandex’s index is slower at crawling new content compared to Google.

• 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.

• Hence, you should be aware that the benefit of your content strategy may take longer to materialise on Yandex. In addition, Yandex’s index is far smaller than Google.

• It is estimated that Yandex has just short of 2 billion pages on its index, a relatively modest figure when compared to Google’s 40 billion.

Keyword density & content• Like for the other major search engines, content quality is one of the most important

ranking factors for Yandex. Yandex punishes pages with low-quality content and does not index pages with thin content.

• In Google’s algorithm, backlink strength and relevance is an important ranking factor. In addition, technical health factors (onsite errors, site speed, etc) and domain trust and authority are also key ways of measuring authority.

• By contrast, Yandex mainly focuses on keyword density and content uniqueness to determine rankings.

• Yandex is very fond of content; the quality of content is much more important for Yandex than for Google.ru.

• Use Unique Texts tool in Yandex.Webmaster!• In order to rank better in Yandex, pages need to contain substantial amount of text: 300-500

words.

Meta tagsYandex take into consideration the following meta tags:

• Title tag: title tag needs to be unique for all pages, and contain important for the page keywords. Generally, Yandex allows slightly longer titles than Google – up to 70 characters – but it’s recommend to keep the title tag at maximum 60 characters so that it looks good in both Google and Yandex.

• Meta Description: Recommended length for Meta Description is 150-160 characters. Yandex quite often chooses to generate its own descriptions. Yandex is more likely to neglect the defined meta descriptions and to show different text from the page instead.

• Meta Keywords: Meta Keywords tag still has some importance for Yandex, although very minor. It is recommended to fill in Meta Keywords tag with 4-5 keywords that are most relevant for the page. Yandex has not confirmed ignoring them.

URL structure• Best practices for URL structure for Yandex are not much different from those for Google:

URLs should be unique for each page, preferably static, and contain important for the page keywords. Pages with very long URLs might face indexing issues.

Image optimization• ALT tags should be filled in for all images. Even though the content of ALT tag does not

have significant effect on rankings, it will help the images to rank in Yandex image search, which can bring additional relevant traffic to the website.

Domain age• Domain age is a very important factor for Yandex. Some SEOs in Russia even believe that

Yandex applies a so-called “Sandbox” filter to all websites that are younger than one year, which does not let these sites rank too high.

Sources:http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/searches.html http://www.russiansearchtips.com/2015/08/russian-internet-audience-reaches-80-million-users/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex http://www.stateofdigital.com/google-v-yandex-linguistic-test/ http://www.semrush.com/blog/5-advantages-yandex-google-russia/ http://www.slideshare.net/aniessenr/yandex-seo-27238235http://www.slideshare.net/KliKKi/yandex-seo-vs-google-seohttp://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/russian-seo-yandex/http://www.searchenginejournal.com/11-things-need-know-yandex-seo/115208/http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/search-engine-optimization-for-yandexhttp://go-mashmobile.com/marketing/toolkit-marketing/seo-for-yandex-in-9542/http://www.demnet.eu/key-differences-google-ru-yandex/http://russiansearchmarketing.com/onsite-optimization-yandex-seo/http://blog.tamar.com/2014/09/4-seo-differences-between-google-and-yandex/http://www.jm-emotion.fi/blog-in-english/98-how-to-succeed-on-russian-online-market-tip-1-yandex-or-googlehttp://askinmask.com/2013/04/what-better-search-engine-yandex-or-google/ http://download.yandex.ru/company/figures/yandex_on_search_in_different_russian_cities.pdfhttp://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/searches.html