Russian Search Engines

[Tanya Kostiouk]

Does anyone know any big search engines in Russia? let me know your experiance.
thank you! Tanya Kostiouk

[moltar]

Yandex
Rambler
Aport

[Rumbas]

Hi Tanya - welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

Somewhat old, but a good place to start:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Here's a few more:

[dir.yahoo.com...]

[Tor]

Yandex
Rambler
Aport

Could someone rank them by number of users?

[mdpromo]

Hello.
May be this will help You:

Yandex 43.0 %
Rambler 17.6 %
Aport 16.4 %

[tebrino]

I have my site translated in Russian, but I don't know how to submit my site to any of these engines. If anyone knows Russian, could you please post URLs where to submit.
Thanks

[moltar]

It's against the TOS to post URLs. I sent you PM.

[rencke]

What about Google.ru? I would have thought that they had grabbed a really big market share by now.

[moltar]

They sure did, but google.ru still uses the same data centers as the rest of google. And all regular rules apply to google.ru as for google.com, thus submiting sites is almost useless. Just get a few good incoming links and your site is spidered.

[mirceagoia]

If you want to see the search engines of the world the click here: wwww.searchenginecolossus.com (it helped me in the past to get a job :) )...

Mircea

[HitProf]

I doubt Google has a big market share in Russia. We're running AdWords campaigns in local languages througout Eastern Europe, including Russia. We're generating very few impressions, even smaller countries like Poland and the Czech republic are generating 10-100 times more impressions. Curious if anyone has another explanation (no butget matter).

[oagady]

Hi, everybody,

This is my first post on this forum.

I have experience with Russian search engines. The top if Rumbler. I believe at the moment it takes about 70% of the market. Then follows Yandex, then Aport. Google has about 9% of the market in Russia (according to the statistics, which I doubt is correct, I believe it is much less), and mostly used by webmasters. My sister lives in Russia and she is very active on the Internet, but until recently she didn't even know that Google.ru existed. This is how popular Google is in Russia.

I have a good ranking on Google with some of my keywords and hardly get any traffic from it.

Regards
Olga

[rencke]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld oagady!

9% market share for Google seems very low. Take a look at these January log figures for a 150-page site in Russian and how the same site ranks in the top engines for the most important keyword:

Yandex: site ranks 2nd, 506 visitors
Google: site ranks 7th, 239 visitors
Rambler: site ranks >30th, 119 visitors
MSN: site ranks >30, 39 visitors

This would certainly leads me to believe that Google has a lot higher market share than 9%. Considering the very high ranking in Yandex, I would guess that Google is very close to Yandex.

[oagady]

Hi, rencke

The statistics on market share I wrote above I took from a Russian webmaster forums. I personally believe that this is somehow correct.

I used to have a very good SERPS on Google.ru for a keyphrase that is VERY competitive. I didn't get more than 3-4 clicks a day from Google.ru though. On the other hand, I have an OK ranking on Rumbler for a keyphrase which is not competitive al all, but I am getting about 10-15 clicks a day from them - just from this keyphrase search.

Some of my experience with Rumbler and Yandex: it's much cheaper to deal with Rumbler than with Yandex. Both of them don't index automatically ".com" sites. You have to manually submit your site (and you have to have a Russian text on the site) and wait for their approval. I have submitted my site to Rumbler and next day got an answer from them that my submission was approved and my site indexed. They crawl my site several times every day.

Yandex, on the other hand, wants money. They have a free submission option to their directory, but they are like Yahoo - never review or crawl your site if it was submitted for free (I am talking about ".com" sites). I was waiting for their review many months until I lost patience, then I just paid them US$150(US$170 with the tax). Next day they reviewed and approved my site. Only after I got in their directory, they started crawling my site regularly.

Rumbler is very fast to pick up the changes on the site - a couple of days. It's a different story with Yandex - it might take them two months to pick up the changes.

Olga

[Jigit]

As I do not have a site which is just in Russian, I cannot tell from my logs accurate breakdown of popularity of Russian search engines.

The following is traffic from search engines in the descending order from discussions in one of the popular webmaster discussion boards:
- yandex.ru
- rambler.ru
- aport.ru
- google.ru
- mail.ru

Based on review of my raw access logs, I would say that the above is correct.

Based on my statistics of my main site, which is both in Russian and English the following is the traffic from the search engines in the descending order:

- Google
- Yahoo
- MSN
- Yandex
- Ask Jeeves
- AOL
- Unknown search engines
- Rambler
- AltaVista

Please note that the above includes search results of my site both in English and Russian.

If you follow google search engine optimization techniques, you should be fine with all Russian search engines.

In general, you need to manually submit your sites to Russian engines. Pages you are submitting to Russian search engines need to be in Russian. Once pages in Russian are indexed, your pages in other languages will be also indexed.

Submission pages to Russian:
Yandex: [webmaster.yandex.ru...]
Rabmler: [rambler.ru...]
Aport: [catalog.aport.ru...]
Mail.ru : First you have to find the directory you are submitting and then follow link:” äîáàâèòü ñàéò”

Please sticky me if you would need to do the SEO and translation into Russian.

[Blackie]

It's really hard to find the breakdown of market share for search engines in Russia which is not from 2001 ;-), but I found an interesting article at cnews.ru saying:
"the closest competitors of Yandex of today is Rambler(with 25% of users), as well as — actively progressing in Russia - Google with 12% of users, Mail.Ru — (5%), News.Yandex — (3%) and Aport — (2%)."

The article itself is about search engine advertising so it might be that this breakedown is based on the money spent on Ads rather then amount of users (but if one reads the sentence above literally the meaning would be that this is users they are talking about). It looks like yandex is having a lion share.

For those who can read in Russian the full story is here:
[cnews.ru...]

If someone finds another numbers from a reliable source please post here. Interesting to find the truth :-)