What Is Yandex?

It’s okay if you’ve never heard of Yandex.

At the moment, it looks like Yandex will need help to take over as the world’s most popular search engine. Google has 92% of the market, while Yandex only has 0.4%. Yandex is slowly losing ground to Google, but its up-to-48 % share of the local market is still very high.

About 145 million people are living in Russia, making it the biggest country in the world. More than 90 million of them use the internet every day. Digital marketing in Russia is a lot like digital marketing in China: it’s separate from the rest of the world and has its own rules.

You should know how to play the game before you try to reach the Russian-speaking market, which is made up of people who are not Russian.

We will talk about what Yandex is, how it’s used, whether Yandex.com is safe and whether Yandex is a good search engine.

What Does Yandex Do?

Yandex N.V. is a global company with its headquarters in Moscow, Russia. It’s Russia’s biggest tech company and provides many different products and services.

They run Russia’s biggest search engine and are best known for that, but they are also involved in a lot of other tech and internet things. Some of these are:

• Music streaming
• eCommerce
• Artificial intelligence
• Ride-hailing via Yandex.Taxi (in collaboration with Uber)
• Self-driving cars
• Maps via Yandex.Maps
• App analytics
• Data management
• Online advertising
• Email services via Yandex.Mail
• Smart home technology
• A voice assistant called Alice for Microsoft, IOS, and Android
• A web browser called Yandex Browser
• And many more…

In 1997, Arkady Volozh (now CEO), Arkady Borkovsky, and Ilya Segalovich started Yandex. The name comes from the phrase “Yet Another iNDEXer.”

In 2011, the company went public. It is now traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol YNDX.

Why Is Yandex Important?

In the past few years, Yandex’s market share has been stable, if not going up. We are sure that Yandex will remain Russia’s top search engine. Aside from the United States, the search engine is also famous in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Turkey, and its popularity is only growing.

Here are the five most significant benefits Yandex has over Google that will help it stay on top of the market for a long time:

#1. Yandex is a portal

Yandex is the most popular place to find information in Russia, and many people start their day on Yandex.ru. In fact, Yandex is Russia’s most prominent television company. A little more than 54 million people come every month.

Google and Yandex both offer free email and traffic maps that show real-time traffic, music, movies, picture storage, and a lot more. Many of these same traits can be found in some of the products that Google has used to spread its brand around the world and get more people to use it. Google was able to get people to switch from inadequate services like Hotmail, Mapquest, and even Dropbox to Google alternatives. In Russia, Google won’t have this choice because the Yandex versions are just as good if they are better.

#2. Yandex is also well-liked on Android

Google can use the Android mobile operating system to boost mobile search because Google Search is built into Android. However, in Russia, it doesn’t work as well. Android makes up more than 70% of the mobile market in Russia. However, Yandex still controls 52% of the search market on these Android phones.

#3. Yandex is superior for searching in Russian.

Since Yandex was made for the Russian market, it is better equipped to handle search problems in Russia. Google could be better at figuring out what people mean when they spell non-English words than it is when they type English words, but it’s even worse when people type Russian words.

For example, the Russian language has a lot of different endings for words; some words can have up to 20 different endings. The grammatical gender of a noun determines how it is used in a sentence in Russian. The way someone’s name is spelt might change based on their gender.

For instance, the ex-wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin has the last name “Putina” instead of “Putin.” Google search only counts pages that are related to the exact query as typed by the user. Yandex, on the other hand, can figure out what the user means by a word or phrase no matter how they spell it. Because of this, Google gives users a worse search experience for highly infected search queries and doesn’t give them a good reason to use Google more often.

#4. It’s possible that Yandex’s algorithm can handle spam more effectively.

In the Russian internet business, people often use link spam techniques. Some “ad” companies only sell links to help websites move up in the search results. Yandex has said that it will no longer use links in its algorithms for business searches in some parts of the country because of this. Yandex will instead only use statistics about user experience and keyword rankings. This project by Yandex is still in its early stages, but it could help Yandex get better results than Google. The second one definitely filters out junk links, but it’s likely still giving credit to low-quality links.

#5. Yandex is a Russian search engine.

Even though Russians like Russian goods more, they also seem to like things from other countries. But after what happened with Snowden and the NSA, Russians may like Yandex more than Google just because they don’t like Google.

Is Yandex com safe?

The browser has a lot of safety features, such as DNSCrypt, which stops DNS hacking, and automatic HTTPS support for networks that aren’t secure.

Even with these features, the Yandex Browser causes a lot of privacy problems. Users have said that Yandex stores their search terms and sends them to a server to be analyzed.

Also, it’s essential to know that the browser is a closed-source project, which means that users can’t look at the source code and judge what the browser does in the background.

Some users say that Yandex Browser has all the rights it needs to collect your information and give it to the police if they ask for it.

Think about it before you use the browser because it has been linked to the Russian government.

How do you do Yandex SEO?

If you want your site to do better in Yandex, you should start by adding it to Yandex Webmaster Tools. Yandex has a free tracking tool that works like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You can use this to send your file to Yandex, check on your progress, see issues with crawling, and other things.

Still, getting ready for Yandex is a lot like getting ready for other search engines. You can improve your Yandex SEO score for the following factors:

• Keywords: You should use keywords in your names and text, just like you would on any other search engine.
• Mobile usability: It’s essential that your site works well and looks good on phones.
• Geo-targeting: Google’s search results may be very different depending on where the user is searching. This is called geo-targeting. Yandex can punish sites that use annoying or misleading popups, just like Google can.
• Search intent: Your content must meet the goal of the person searching, just like Google does.
• Content quality: It is essential to have good content that answers people’s search questions.
• On-page SEO: Make your URLs, internal links, title tags, descriptions, and other parts better.
• Site speed: Yandex gives more weight to sites that load quickly.
• Crawlability: Robots should be able to crawl your site without any problems, and it shouldn’t be hidden behind a “noindex” tag.
• Links: Links that come from other sites affect your rank. Links may not be as crucial in Yandex as they are in Google for some types of searches. Why is this? Because Russia has a big problem with link spam, they stopped using links as a ranking reason for some business queries.

Summary

Yandex’s market share has grown over the past few years while Rambler and Mail.ru have suffered, while Google’s market share in Russian search has actually gone down a bit. Because of things about the Russian market that don’t appear in other places, Yandex is likely to keep growing faster than Google.

With so much at stake and so many benefits coming from Russia’s continued web growth, we can expect Google to keep fighting (as long as they aren’t banned by law). It will be interesting to see what Google does to become the best search engine in Russia by investing in and buying other companies.

There is one thing that both Yandex and Google hate about black hat SEO, even though they are very different giants. It’s terrible for both Google and Yandex when SEO experts play unfair games, but Yandex is more burdensome when the tricks are uncovered.