Yandex becomes the 4th largest global search engine
Yandex, Russia’s premier search engine, has overtaken Microsoft’s Bing to become the World’s 4th largest search engine, according to comScore Search statistics released last month.
The report shows search engine market share based on search requests, and estimates that Yandex had 4.84 billion search requests during December 2012, compared to Bing’s 4.48 billion. These estimates means that Yandex has 2.8% market share, compared to Bing’s 2.5%.
The data reaffirmed Google as the dominant search engine globally, a 65% share, followed in second place by Baidu with an estimated 8% share, with Yahoo ranking 3rd.
According to Yandex, the search engine had an estimated 60% of all search traffic in October 2012 in Russia, where the population is close to 142 million. This dominant market share in Russia along with a growing internet market in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey is likely to have influenced Yandex’s position in global search rankings.
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SEO Russia – Mobile Internet Usage
Russian Internet Mobile usage is on the rise according to recent reports form Mobtop in Russia.
Russia still lags behind the rest of the Western world, but is seemingly catching up, with 2.5% increases registered during the 1st 2 months of 2012.
The profile of the Mobile user base remains predominantly young and male. Interestingly, Nokia holds by far the largest market share in Russia, with the iPhone barely registering. Android shows a very strong growth, driven by availability of lower price devises, compared iPhone.
SEO Russia – Implications of Algorithm updates for Yandex
Google is not the only Search Engine updating its’ algorithm currently. Yandex, Russia’s biggest Search Engine with 64% market share, has also recently been revisiting indexation protocol.
Key implications of this can be summarised:-
- Better rankings for strong brands. The evidence suggests that Yandex is going the same way as Google on favouring well-established brands on organic search. This shift is likely to drive more small to mid-sized companies to advertise on Yandex.Direct ads.
- Increased focus on user-generated content. Again, following the Google path, it appears that blogs, user-generated content is having increased traction on Yandex.
- Importance of Yandex Market. Yandex Market is a version of Google Shopping. Customer reviews from Yandex Market are ranking higher than ever on Yandex, meaning that more e-com sites are likely to be actively using Yandex Market.
- Yandex SERPs have become more social – Yandex (like Baidu recently) are now showing links to social media profiles in page snippets principally to Facebook, vKontakte, Twitter and LiveJournal. In order to get these links in your snippet, the social profiles need to be linked from your website.
Currently snippets with social medial links are only available for certain verticals (gifts and travel amongst others), although this is likely to apply to a broader range of verticals later this year.