Slidedeck from my presentation at the Barcelona Affiliate Conference 2013.

1. Mike Litson
Yandex SEO
Email: mike@blueclaw.co.uk
Skype: m.litson

2. Russian Market
Webmoney and Yandex Money have always been
dominant in terms of payment processing. Although
since Paypal’s introduction of roubles last month it
could see growth.
Russian punters are less willing to part with their
card details so conversions benefit from trusted
brands.
Land gambling is essentially non existent in any legal
form, these laws came into effect in 2009.
Making online gambling the only option to a lot of
future customers. Due to the vast distance between
the “gaming zones”.

3. Russian Market

4. Market Share
April 2011
Feb 2012
The Chrome
Browser was
largely responsible
for the dip in
market share
shown here.
However it should be noted that Yandex appears to have recovered to
approximately 65% of the market share according to recent figures, this is
likely due to the popularity of Yandex’s own browser.

5. Browsers
Yandex Browser has only 5% share but is still
growing.
Opera is still a major desktop browser too.

6. Yandex History
•
AGS 17 and AGS 30 Update (filter against sites made for selling
links and other spam sites)
•
Series of minor updates
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Brand Favouritism
Yandex and Ad heavy pages
Social integration and “people search”
Social and “fresh information”
•
Yandex had regionalised search (Venice) in 2009. Not overly
important to gambling affiliates.
•
Personalised Results Update in December (OVERKILL) 80% of
results were effected and opt in compulsory. 1st place now gets
37% higher CTR!

7. Other Noteable Updates
Reykjavik 2011 – This algorithm learned to identify language
preferences of a user, and depending on that, display more or fewer
search results in English.
Keep this in mind when checking rankings etc.
Obninsk 2010 – This devalued “paid links” it didn’t cause huge
volumes of penalties just removed a lot of value.

8. Yandex Social
In 2012 Segalovich (one of the Yandex founders)
confirmed the search engine would be looking at social
shares and more than half of search results will be in
some way effected by social signals.
• Yandex has had a long standing data agreement with
twitter and twitter is Growing
• Facebook is shrinking
• VK is Growing
• Odnoklassniki is shrinking
Looking at this data it should give you some idea of
where weight will be given.

9. Yandex Copy Protection
• TIC 10+
• >2000 characters
• <32000 characters
• The content is not
indexed elsewhere
• NOT A GUARANTEE

10. Links - TIC
“Our Thematic Citation Index (TIC) determines the «credibility» of internet resources based on
a qualitative assessment of links to other sites. The greater the quality the more «weight» the
link is said to have. This indicator is calculated by a specially developed algorithm.
The similarity in content between the source and the site to which it links, plays an important
part in this equation. The number of links to a specific site also influences the TIC value, but
the TIC is not ultimately defined by the quantity of links, but the total of their weights.”

11. Links
“Link purchasing would not lead to the purchasing site's rank
being increased” - Yandex
•
On Theme More Important
•
High Level Directories – Mail.ru, Yandex Directory, Dmoz
•
Press Releases (surprisingly effective)
•
But it’s not about SPAM!!!!!!
•
Yandex IS aware of places like SAPE and you shouldn’t buy from there!

12. On Site

13. On Site
The no index tag is
awesome, but really not all that
useful.
The interactive snippets are brilliant, but
rarely seen.
Potentially very powerful. These can be
edited on site or in YWMT.
Other than that and that Yandex likes internal linking from within content
more Google best practices apply.

14. Snippets
•
How Yandex Treats Snippets and the value of CTR
I. Can take snippets from Content
II. Dmoz
III. Yandex Directory
IV. Or your Meta
V. Special snippets (75 unique for businesses)
•
Favicons – Practically essential
•
Links to social profiles
•
Contact info – sub by Yandex webmaster

15. Quick Case
Solely from optimising snippets, social and cleaning up a mess of mixed English
and Russian content sections.
No increase in link building!

16. Dramatized Natural Link
Velocities
These graphs are
exaggerated
visualisations of
data gathered
from several
monitoring tools.
They related solely
to consumer
products and are
from a limited data
set including solely
large brands.
These were
selected for their
natural profiles. As
this is what we
need to replicate.

17. Yandex Future
•
More social integration
•
More focus on user behaviour and the Yandex Browser and OS
•
Yandex and Google often mimic each other
•
Yandex still is NOT penalty happy and it’s unlikely it will be.
•
More personalisation!!!! User metrics being pushed more and more.
•
Atom is the next new technology. It will probably have limited impact on gambling for
the moment. http://atom.yandex.ru/

18. Questions?