Yandex is a Russian company best known for its search engine.
It is a search engine that was originally launched in Russian at yandex.ru, but now has a global English version at yandex.com.
Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia. According to Statcounter, it had a market share of 48,79% in Russia in July 2019, compared to 47,88% for Google.
Yandex NV is a global internet company headquartered in Moscow, Russia.
It is the largest technology company in Russia and offers a wide range of goods and services.
Yandex is best known as the owner of Russia's largest search engine, but it is also active in many other areas and activities related to technology and the internet. These include:
Arkady Volozh (current CEO), Arkady Borkovsky, and Ilya Segalovich founded Yandex in 1997. The name is a play on the phrase "Yet Another iNDEXer".
The company went public in 2011 and is currently listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol YNDX.
Here are the five most important advantages that Yandex has over Google and that will help Yandex maintain its market dominance in the foreseeable future:
Yandex, like Google, offers free email, real-time traffic maps, music, movies, image storage, and much more. Many of these similar features can also be found in some of the products Google has used to increase its global reach by familiarizing consumers with the Google brand.
Google was able to lure consumers away from inferior services like Hotmail, Mapquest, and even Dropbox in favor of Google alternatives. Google won't have this option in Russia, as the Yandex versions are equivalent, if not superior.
While Google can leverage its Android mobile operating system to enhance mobile search, as Google Search is integrated into Android, it is not as successful in Russia. In Russia, Android accounts for more than 70% of the mobile market; nevertheless, Yandex holds a 52% share of the search market on these very same Android smartphones.
Yandex was specifically developed for the Russian market and is better suited for Russian search queries. In general, Google isn't nearly as good at interpreting user intent regarding spelling in non-English searches as it is in English, but it's even worse in Russian.
For example, the ex-wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin has the surname "Putina," not "Putin." While Google Search only lists pages that match the user's exact search query, Yandex can interpret synonyms and user intent, regardless of how the user spells it. As a result, Google offers a poorer search experience for heavily infected queries and provides no compelling reason for users to use Google more frequently.
Overt link spam tactics are widespread in the Russian internet industry. Several "advertising" companies exist whose sole purpose is to sell links to improve search engine rankings.
As a result, Yandex has announced that it will no longer use links in its algorithms for commercial search queries in certain parts of the country. Yandex will instead rely entirely on user experience and keyword ranking data.
This initiative by Yandex is still in its early stages, but it could enable Yandex to deliver higher-quality results than Google. While Google definitely filters spam links, it most likely still awards credits for low-quality links.
While Russians generally prefer Russian goods, they also seem to like international products. However, after the Snowden/NSA affair, Russians may now prefer Yandex simply because they dislike Google.
As mentioned previously, Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia with a market share of 48,79%, compared to 47,88% for Google.
Please note that this figure varies depending on the source. Some sources indicate Yandex's market share is over 50%, and most agree that Yandex is more popular than Google in Russia.
According to the Similarweb Yandex.ru is also the most visited website in Russia. However, Yandex is also very popular in many other countries besides Russia:
Here is Yandex's market share in different countries (Statcounter(July 2019):
In all the countries mentioned above, with the exception of Russia, Yandex is the second most popular search engine after Google. Its high market share may simply reflect the large number of Russian speakers living or traveling in these countries.
Yandex is still a relatively small search engine compared to global search engines, with a Market share of 0,55%This makes it the fifth largest search engine in the world after Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu. Yandex's global market share is similar to that of... DuckDuckGo, which ranks 6th with a market share of 0,54%
If you want to optimize your website's performance in Yandex, you should start by adding it to Yandex Webmaster Tools.
This is a free analytics service from Yandex, similar to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You can use it to upload your sitemap to Yandex, track your performance, Crawling-Seeing errors, etc. Apart from that, SEO For Yandex, it's very similar to SEO for other search engines.
These are some of the Yandex SEO ranking factors you can optimize for:
Interestingly, links are less important on Yandex for certain types of search queries than on Google.
This is because Yandex had a major problem with link spam in Russia and decided to devalue links as a ranking factor for some commercial search queries.
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