Google vs Yandex: products, services and SEO aspects

International seo consultant from IM Action carried out the research about two popular search engines in Russia. One of them is owned by Google, the largest American computer software and search engine company. It was founded in 1997 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Today, Google is a multinational leading IT-company, which specializes in online advertising, cloud computing, search and software.

The second largest search giant is Yandex that dominates in the Russian market and across CIS countries. The company dates back to 1990, when it was established by Arkady Borkovsky and Arkady Volozh. According to statistics, its market share is more than 60%. Yandex’s main revenue is made on text-based advertising. It also provides mail, maps, music, cloud and other services. Today, Yandex is trying to expand its business activity all over the world.

Google and Yandex Products and Services

Here is a list of Google and Yandex tools and services, which are similar to each other in many ways.  

There are also special tools for Yandex and Google. Yandex has Yandex.Market (for comparing prices and characteristics of goods and services); Yandex.Money (an online electronic payment service), Yandex.News, Yandex.Slovari, Yandex.Fotki, Yandex.Terra (a geological data processing service) and many other products. The company recently launched Yandex.Radio, a new media player with over 100 stations sorted by genre, context and mood.

When we say “Google”, we mean “search”. Although this is a very narrow definition of it. Google, a Hi-Tech giant, has more than 100 products, services and applications.  Among them there are popular, fast and simple products that connect with multiple devices, advertising solutions (for search products or services) and Android mobile platform (a mobile operating system based on Linux software, a competitor to Apple's iOS).

Google SEO Specifics

Navigating in Google requires not only deep understanding of how search engine algorithms operate, but also specifics of the latest updates. Today Google focuses on three key things for successful international search engine marketing: content and usability, quality of links and importance of being mobile.

So, Google likes:

• Unique and refreshable content (it should include unique texts, videos and images on all pages);
• Natural content;
• Natural links from trusted platforms (link exchange or catalogue posting are not allowed);
• Social signals like links from social networks  or Likes and Shares on a page;
• Domain age and credibility play a role in ranking websites (being old means good in this case);
• Mobile access to the website.

Yandex SEO Specific

Yandex SEO requirements differ from that of Google and other search engines. Anyway, marketing specialists should take them into account.

Yandex likes:

• Quality content;

It is useless to manipulate with low-quality, over-optimized content. Russian language is a must. The majority of users search information in Russian language. It is essential to understand language peculiarities as well as mentality and cultural peculiarities of the Russian-speaking audience.

• Internal linking;

Internal linking with optimized anchor text plays a great role for Yandex. It helps users navigate from page to page and increase quantity of page views.

• Meta tags;

What are key things for Yandex algorithm? Title and Meta Description tags, Meta Keywords tag and keywords in ALT tags for pictures are extremely important.

• Good usability;

Usability is a complex ranking factor. Good usability leads to lower bounce rate and increases the number of page views.

• Domain age;

Yandex appreciates old resources. Some marketers think that Yandex does not enable young websites to get top rank positions in SERP. Although this statement does not always work, newly developed websites face certain difficulties in gaining high ranking in Yandex. Anyway, it is important to provide a good start and create relevant, high quality and optimized content.