Paving the Online Road to Russia
April 20th, 2010
Russia’s government last month announced possible plans to launch a national search engine, their aim being to have tighter control over filtration, and to ensure the ‘safe access of information’. The venture would set them back around $100 million (around £65 million), and it would be a long and lengthy process to overtake the market leader Yandex, who currently hold 62.8% of the market share in Russia. Despite the plans being questionable, the announcement does bring to attention certain aspects of the Russian search market.
Yandex is the world’s fastest growing search engine, with a massive 80% growth between December 09 and 10. Its popularity in Russia is mostly down to its in-depth and through knowledge of the “complexities and nuances of the Russian language”. The semantics of the Russian language differ from those of the English language, such as the notion of the ‘perfective’ and ‘imperfective’ verb. Whilst Google is able to function reasonably in the Russian language, it still has the foundations of a search engine which was built to work for the English language and Latin script, and therefore can have problems understanding the finer details of Russian semantics. Yandex was built and developed for the Russian language, and understands it as well as Google understands English, which is undoubtedly why it’s Russia’s search engine of choice.
So, what does this mean for UK businesses wanting to improve on their SEO in Russia?
Firstly, it important to stress that, as with all multilingual SEO, simply translating a site from English to Russian will not suffice. Research needs to be carried out into the intricacies of Russian search behaviours, such as popular key words and phrases. Oban Multilingual SEO found that Russian searchers often use plural phrases when searching i.e. ‘search engines’ rather than ‘search engine’. Yandex does have its own keyword tool, Wordstat, which provides users with a better insight to Russian search behaviours than the Russian Google keyword tool.
Backlinking is important when it comes to search engine optimisation in Russia, however, carrying out the process effectively can be tricky. Many link directories can be spammy and irrelevant, and although there is the possibility to sign up to lots of them, websites who do will be penalized in Yandex search results. Instead, it’s best to follow the same rules as when backlinking for Google – select quality and industry related links, and essentially with Russian-based sites.
Some examples of relevant business related directories in Russia are http://www.ipag.ru/, http://navigator.yp.ru/ and http://www.allbusiness.ru/.
Yandex, like other ‘local’ search engines such as China’s Baidu, prefers sites hosted in Russia, with a Russian domain name i.e. .ru. In 2009 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced its approval for the use of top level domain names i.e.com, .net, .ru, featuring non-Latin characters. This means that Russia’s most popular top level domain name can now be written in Cyrillic (‘.ru’ becomes ‘.рф’, which stands for ‘Rossiyskaya Federatsiya’ – Russian Federation). Yandex haven’t yet made it clear whether they are planning to hold preference to Cyrillic domain names, but if they do, it will have a huge effect on SEO practice in Russia.
Russia holds a promising online market. By looking at the trends of local search, the complexities of the Russian language and by adhering to the principles of Yandex, UK businesses can improve their search rankings, and reap the rewards of what Russia has to offer.
Greig Holbrook
