2022 has been a very different year for the Russian SEO scene, with major real-world events shifting the technological and consumer landscapes in ways no one at the start of the year would have predicted, and unlike anything seen during Covid (if anything, a reversal in user trends).
In this post, we’re going to recap some of the bigger changes that have affected how businesses optimize for, report on, and to an extent can rely on organic search both now and in 2023.
Sale of News & Zen to Vkontakte
Yandex Zen was a user-personalized content feed that utilizes machine learning to refresh and return content for users, and like Google News, Yandex News was an aggregator of news publications.
After the outbreak of the war, Yandex’s move to sell the two platforms isn’t too surprising to the Wester World. Yandex as a company work to be politically neutral, and whilst they legally were unable to control the content being published by news outlets – a 2017 law made them as an aggregator and distributor of the news equally as liable.
At the start of 2017, Russia passed a federal law that made news aggregators themselves liable for spreading fake news, however, news items from registered media outlets (a state-regulated media category) are exempt from the liability.
So the choices were risk distribution of news that would be seen as inflammatory by the Russian government or continuing to only distribute news from state-regulated media.
Zen, being a UGC platform also exposed Yandex to some liability – so the sale to VK isn’t too surprising.
VK is a Russian online social media and social networking service based in Saint Petersburg. In May 2021 it was estimated the platform had 656-million users.
- Learn about Yandex Zen
- VK confirms the acquisition of Zen and News products from Yandex
- Is (was) Yandex News politically biased?
- Yandex.ru redirect to Dzen.ru is complete (November 2022)
Yandex Marketplace Changes
Throughout 2022 Yandex has made a number of changes to it’s Marketplace, including measures to prevent price exploitation, negative review attacks, and additional support to vendors.
Yandex Market on average gets 500 million visits in the last quarter (2022: Sep, Oct, Nov), whereas for comparison Russian eCommerce giants Wildberries attract around 994 million over the same period.
- The Russian Ecommerce Market Grew by 43% in the First Quarter of 2022
- Yandex Market To Combat Price Exploitation
- Yandex.Market Now Allows All Users To Sell Used & Discounted Goods
- Yandex Market Updates How The Store Quality Index Is Calculated
- Yandex.Market Froze The Quality Index For Stores Amongst Other Support
- Yandex Market Began Selling Children’s Products Under Its Own “Junion” Brand
- Yandex.Market Now Allows All Users To Sell Used & Discounted Goods
JavaScript Rendering
Yandex announced changes in the bypass of AJAX sites by robots. Now, instead of checking HTML versions of pages, robots will execute scripts on AJAX sites.
Importantly, pages with #! are no longer supported by the search engine.
- Yandex makes changes to the indexing of AJAX websites
- Control JS rendering from Yandex Webmaster Tools
RSN Editorial News
And on a final note, we’d like to welcome Aleks to the editorial team at Russian Search News.
Aleks will be covering the latest market changes and news, as well as producing guides and building the next phase of this website’s editorial strategy as we head into 2023 and beyond.
Our plan at present is that we will continue to cover Yandex and Russian SEO-related news through 2023 and beyond pending any major market or legal changes. As a website, we stand with Ukraine.