How Yandex and Google “Look” at Websites

How Yandex and Google “Look” at Websites

Website owners often wonder why promotion results in Yandex and Google differ significantly. The thing is that there are a number of differences in the algorithmic formulas of these search engines, which is extremely useful to know in optimization practice. Today we will talk about the characteristic features of both search engines when evaluating the relevance of resources and their approach to forming search results, as well as the pitfalls that a competent optimizer must be prepared for.

Document Indexing

In the Google search engine, there are two types of indexes: the main index and the Supplemental Index, which includes documents that the search engine considers less useful (usually duplicates or pages with a small amount of content). These pages do not participate in search results, which many resource owners do not even realize. You can identify documents that have fallen under a filter in the following way: in the Google search bar, you need to type a query like site:www.somesite.ru/& and get a list of pages in the main index. Pages that have been indexed but do not appear in the list are placed in the supplemental index. They should be edited and filled with information or (if this makes no sense) deleted or blocked from indexing.

Here are a few recommendations on what to do with different types of pages that have ended up in Google’s supplemental index:

• service sections and pages of minor importance for search engine promotion (such as user profiles) should be blocked from indexing, and canonical URLs can be used to get rid of page duplicates;
• catalog, subcatalog, and category sections (and similar ones) need to be filled with accompanying descriptions and have a few “fat” external links placed on them;
• product pages containing non-unique information can be brought into the main index by purchasing a couple of cheap backlinks.

SERP Update

Both Google and Yandex have fastbots that constantly scan the search database for new documents or changes to old ones. However, database updates, called “updates”, occur in each of the search engines with varying frequency. Updates in Google happen daily, due to which updated pages on the site almost immediately enter the index and begin to participate in search. They go quite smoothly and do not cause such upheavals as Yandex updates. The latter keeps optimizers waiting for a long time and “rolls out” updates every 1-2 weeks. At the same time, it often presents surprises in the form of a strong search result “storm”, leading to serious changes in page positions (growth or devaluation). Therefore, webmasters and SEO specialists closely monitor Yandex updates and allocate separate threads on forums for discussing them.

External Links

The link factor still plays a significant role in the ranking formula of both search engines. But as for promotion in Yandex, here you need to select links much more carefully – without natural links (both with and without anchor texts) that provide transitions to the promoted pages, it will be hardly possible to achieve positive results from external optimization.

Google also places high demands on the quality of external links, but is not too strict regarding their thematic relevance and the diversity of link profile sources. The foreign search engine accepts sitewide links very well, giving them greater weight, while the Runet search leader prefers links from both the home page and internal pages and takes their total weight into account. As for anchor texts, direct keyword matches are important for Google, while word forms are important for Yandex. Thus, for link promotion to be effective everywhere, it is necessary to improve the quality of the link mass and make it more diverse.

Internal Optimization

Website quality is a critical factor for both search engines. Still, Google pays closer attention to the optimization of each individual page and its relevance to the search query. Great importance in the evaluation process is given to internal linking, Title and Description meta tags (the latter is used to form the snippet), page microdata, and the placement of social media buttons and widgets. In addition, recently Google specialists have increasingly focused webmasters’ attention on the importance of adapting the site for mobile devices, which is one of the ranking factors in mobile search. Yandex, of course, also looks at resource optimization, but at the same time gives paramount importance to the uniqueness of the content (more on this below) and page Title tags.

Content

The role of content in promotion within Yandex is significantly higher. While Google is quite loyal to rewrites and even indexes non-unique texts and images, providing traffic for them, Yandex strictly considers the factor of uniqueness and thematic relevance of the site’s content, lowering pages with borrowed content in the search results or not including them in the index at all. As for the distribution of keywords in the page content, it is recommended to use the most important queries above the rest (at the beginning of the text), as well as to “dilute” the content with their synonyms. The text must be natural, not over-spammed with keywords, and easily perceived by the user.

Website Metrics

When creating and optimizing a website, it is worth considering that Google negatively perceives low page load speeds and may penalize this by lowering positions. This is so important that the search engine specialists have created a special tool for checking loading speed to help webmasters identify the problem in advance. The optimal result is at least 90 points out of a possible 100. As for the age of the site, Google is friendly to young resources and, provided they are competently optimized, lets them into the TOP much faster than Yandex does.

Regionality

When promoting exclusively in Google, you can completely ignore the concept of regionality. The situation is the opposite with Yandex, where the need to choose a promotion region is driven by the geo-dependency of queries. To a greater extent, this factor applies to commercial sites selling goods or services in local markets. Yandex displays and ranks such resources differently in each region (although errors are not excluded, and, for example, in the Moscow search results for a geo-dependent query, you might find a Novgorod online store). You can assign a region to a site via the Yandex.Webmaster service.

Speed of Entering the TOP

Taking into account document indexing times and update systems, the average time to bring a website to the Yandex TOP takes more than 4 months (in competitive commercial topics – from half a year or more), while reaching the Google TOP is possible in just 1–2 months.

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