How to optimize for Russian Search Engines?

SEO in Russian

[ulijonroth]

Hello everyone,

I feel this is the right place to ask the question but I need some ideas about optimizing a website for Russian search engines.

I have some questions...

- Which search sites are the most known ones in Russia? Or for Russian people?
- Are they taking a web site as Google? Or do they have major differences?
- Do they prefer .ru domains to .com domains?
- Which facts do they penalize and filter?
- Are there any useful information for getting indexed on these pages?
- As I guess these search sites give points to backlinking, but what are the ups and downs?
- How can we search for useful keywords? Are there any websites or systems for suggestions?
- I heard something like "quotation index", like Page Rank for Yandex. What are the main facts about this to have a good point?

I thank everyone who shares their ideas and views by now...

[lammert]

Yandex is a powerful player in Search in Russia and other Russian speaking countries. Most important is that your site is translated natively in the Russian language. My experience in CIS countries is that people don't search much for other language sites, except for sites in their local non-Russian languages.

[hitklip]

The main search site in Russia - Yandex - its search market share is 65%, the share of Google - 22%, there is still Mail (9%) and Rambler (4%).
There is a "quotation index", like page rank for Yandex, called "TIC".
Key words and queries in Yandex can see the link [wordstat.yandex.ru...]

[Rumbas]

Hi ulijonroth,

Welcome to the Euro Forum!

Good questions, thanks for posting them :)

For keyword research you can use Google External Keyword tool and set it on Russian language.

[nomis5]

As far as I understand, and I do have experience of one Russian site, the language must be Russian and they do favour .ru domains.

Aside from that there are no secret recipes for Yandex, just the normal slog at producing quality pages with relevant content. Nothing is new in this world, even the Russian world.

[ulijonroth]

Thanks for the useful information...

I will start a SEO campaign for a new customer and these are wonderful hints for me.

And Rumbas thanks for your kind attention to my questions...

[Rumbas]

You're welcome ulijonroth - that's why we're here :)

Good luck with the campaign and do let us know how it turns out.

[ulijonroth]

I will let you know about the campaign for sure...
It is estimated to start next month and I think it will take up to 6 months work...

[geekay]

"Most important is that your site is translated natively in the Russian language." It could be useful to remember that, strictly speaking, that does not hold in all cases anymore. See this May discussion: Yandex Launches Latin Script Version To Expand Audience Internationally [webmasterworld.com].

The OP did not say his site was in Russian, only that he is "optimizing a website for Russian search engines". Yandex is now offering both Latin and Cyrillic search filters for all their users. (But of course his site's language could be implied.)

The Yandex bot has been remarkably active on eg. my Western European, English language site for at least a year. Anyhow, I have heard there are SEO concerns regarding some significant details in their particular way of crawling (see the above discussion), but too little seems to be known about such details outside of Russia. It looks like they will index URLs that Google will not index. My own traffic from Yandex is still very low, but as Yandex obviously has global intentions it will most likely be useful for many webmasters to know more about this SE. I, for one, am looking for information.

[nautis]

Does Yandex takes into account sites translated into Russian, via for ex. Google Automatic translation tool ?

[Rumbas]

Hi nautis! Welcome to WebmasterWorld and the Euro Forum.

Translating a site using automated tools is never a good idea. One thing is that Yandex might index and rank your page(s), but the users that will end up there from a search, will probably quickly leave as they will know it's bad translation.

But yes, Yandex will of course rank pages that are in Russian.

[ulijonroth]

I have been working on Yandex with the advices given and they work pretty well but I tried some black hat as auto blogging with auto translation plugin and I see that the crappy Russian translations are indexed at Yandex.

[tobiasr]

This is an interesting thread. We have an upcoming project in Ukraine, and maybe you have some feedback for me as well:

- are URLs better in Cyrillic or Latin characters?
- does anyone have detailed information about how Google and Yandex handle stemming of Russian words and what to optimize for?
- especially in Ukraine: I assume it's better to optimize for Ukrainian Russian, not Ukrainian? What about city and region names (official spelling versus search trends from keyword tool).
- on a cursory review of some SERPs, it seems that Google places much higher importance on domain authority when searching for Russian words instead of on backlink profile. Is this true?

Thanks!

[dminenko]

Hi all!

Last month I attended RIF+KIB 2011, the major Internet event in Russia, mostly to learn for myself the situation around Internet Marketing in Russia. Please check my review using link below, I hope it will answer to many of your questions.

[multilingual-search.com...]

I am going to post more articles on SEO/SEM in Russia, so keep your eye on posts here if you have interest in this market.

[danny63]

My way is doing what is best for google and it will do best in others