An Article About Yandex's Snezhinsk Algorithm

Posted by Ryan on 2011-03-09

Yeah I know, this blog is supposed to be about Chinese SEO and China Internet marketing. But isn’t globalization what we are talking about all the time? So today I am going to share some secrets about the Russian search engine, Yandex, and its major algorithm – the Snezhinsk Algorithm. (I am writing about it anyway, bite me!)

Around a year ago I participated in a small SEO project with my friend, who is engaged in international trade between Russia and China. We worked on search engine marketing for his Russian website and of course, we studied Yandex and its algorithms.

Below are the key factors that determine your rankings on Yandex, according to our experiments:

  1. Age of the domain name: the older, the better;
  2. Age of the external links’ domains: again, the older, the better;
  3. Unique content: duplicate content doesn’t kill you, but an excessive amount of duplicate content can harm your rankings on Yandex;
  4. Relevance of anchor text: duh…
  5. Keywords in title: thank you again, Captain Obvious…
  6. Number of internal links: anchor text for internal links has little importance compared with that for external links, according to what we found.
  7. Web standards: Yandex’s ability to properly recognize and process different blocks on a website is poor…even poorer than Baidu’s…so you’d better do it a favor and keep everything on your site simple.

If you do the above, you will very possibly have good rankings on Yandex, because I did. Things may change a little for Yandex, but I guess not much, as for other major search engines.

(Now a small questions: is the Amur River is the river between Russia and China, as I assumed?)

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