Yandex is a Russian internet company that provides a number of services like advertising, email system, taxi, maps, smart home technology, voice assistant, etc. However, it is mostly known by its search engine.
Yandex’s search engine is the most popular search engine in Russia. Its search market is bigger than Google’s. Yandex has an international version as well and is considered to be the 5th most popular search engine in the world.
Website owners try to optimize for Yandex since it is less competitive, it is easier to attract Russian audiences there, and paid search is less expensive.
Factors that Influence Rankings in Yandex
In order to rank on Yandex better, SEO professionals try to work with these ranking metrics:
Geo-Targeting
Yandex pays a lot of attention to location. While giving results on services and products, it will show local businesses. Therefore, you have to specify your region (it is possible to give up to 7 locations) and sign up to Yandex Business Directory.
User Engagement
Unlike Google, Yandex prioritizes user engagement. It is important for the search engine how long the user stays on the website and goes to other pages.
Content
Yandex does not rank higher over-optimized content and is less tolerable towards plagiarism and irrelevant answers.
Age of Domain
The older domain is, the higher it ends up.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile-friendly websites are important to all search engines since more than half of the traffic comes from mobile devices.
It is also important to mention that backlinks mean nothing to Yandex. The only thing you can benefit from link building in this dimension is traffic driven by those backlinks.
Yandex crawlers also visit pages less often so you may have to wait sometime before indexing on their engine.
