Website Analytics
December 20, 2024
Yandex is a powerful search engine, based in Russia, but with a reach across Europe and the rest of the world, including the USA.
I think that if you are serious about search engine marketing, the Yandex search console must be a tool in your online marketing arsenal. In this article I will provide a short tutorial on using the webmaster tool on Yandex to fortify your online website marketing.
First, I want to highlight that Yandex is not under the control of Google. I believe this is important and here is why. Google results have become skewed to a degree based on politics.
If you don’t believe me, do a test yourself by using the exact same search phrase in Yandex and also Google. Are the results the same?
This search console, like Google’s search console helps to identify trends and measure conversion funnels in your content marketing campaign.
I have mentioned over the last few years the fact Google has been getting slammed by the European Union for not following the GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, which resulted in gigantic fines and also bad press. The more I talk about that fact the more my websites get buried in search pages.
“A Russian court has fined Google two undecillion roubles - a two followed by 36 zeroes - for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube. In dollar terms that means the tech giant has been told to pay $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Despite being one of the world's wealthiest companies, that is considerably more than the $2 trillion Google is worth.” ~ BBC, October 2024
Mechanics Of Yandex
Let’s take a quick look at five features that make the Yandex search engine successful.
It uses a machine learning algorithm that's significantly improved the relevance of search results by considering a large number of factors.
Its' technology design detects inferences in implicit queries and returns matching search results based on user intent.
It deploys search bots that update its index, the mother lode of data, every 1.5-2 hours.
Local and regional search queries are done with geotargeting and a localized service design.
Included are voice searches, AL (Artificial Intelligence) and mobile driven searches.
Features Of Yandex
You need a free account to use the webmaster tool interface.
As you setup that account the system creates an email with yandex.com, that you are able to customize, but more importantly its where your email is sent related to the properties, aka websites, you have listed in your webmaster tool account.
If you are like me, an administrator many websites, its easy to manage all of them on this one Yandex interface and with one login. You can give other people delegation to admin a domain and I will cover that shortly.
One significant benefit is ease of use. Yandex has integrated “Yandex Business” and “Yandex Metrica” into this account for each domain you list.
Yandex Metrica
Similar to Google Tags, this is location where you learn about tags and also install tags on your website pages. If you are insure about the tech side of this, a step by step tutorial on making tags and even a sales funnel is provided.
Yandex Business
This is similar to Bing Business Or a Google Business Profile account. I like it because it’s within the same account, making it easier to use when I am already updating website info and content on a domain. To do geographic marketing you will use this service to list the city or state or country where you want to be displayed in search engine results.
Navigation Of Search Console
SUMMARY
I call this the dashboard that is showing recent activity that includes any issues detected while indexing your website that includes, crawl statistics, search updates and details about clicks on your organic links in search results.
WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
You can subscribe to receive a weekly digest of info related to the domain you are reviewing. You can quickly check what region(s) you have selected for your website to display under and also your results under Yandex Business.
SITE QUALITY
At this location you are going to view website diagnostics, and security violations.
EFFICENCY
I think of this as the frontend of a website. Information displayed is analytics data where you see results of where you website is placing in organic search results.
INDEXING
I think of this section as the backend because you check the status of activity on your website that is displayed on the front end (EFFICIENCY).
This is place to check that your sitemap is indexed properly and if not, request that it be checked.
Remove pages from search results is done here. For example, you have a page you want to be kept private and forgot to add the “nofollow” tag. Or, maybe you have configured Yandex differently in geographic searches than you did Google Search and you want to move some pages off the Yandex scope.
If you have an RSS file you can validate it here instead of going to another website to get that accomplished.
There is a section dedicated to validating your structured data here, aka snippets. I like it because it shows different markup tools that include: microdata, schema.org, microformats, OpenGraph, and RDFa.
That Yandex listed five resources for structured data is excellent example of being a global website marketing tool versus Google because at Google only the schema.org is listed, I suppose that is because Google brought it to life.
LINKS
Four types of links here. First, there iis report on any broken links within your website. You will also see display of links within your website pages, and links on your website that lead to another website (outbound links), and also links into your website from another website (inbound links).
TURBO PAGES
They provide a useful tutorial here on creating an RSS feed. I have been talking for years now, owning a website means being a publisher, and the most efficient on publishing tool is an RSS feed.
There is a “how to” section and then sections to view stats and diagnose your feed.
If you want a decent RSS template to use on Yandex your feed they have it. I am using a more common RSS design that is a generic structure.
That this encouragement exists in Yandex to have an RSS feed demonstrates to me they want you to win.
USEFUL SERVICES
This is listing of Yandex products that include an ad service (fee based), the tag manager: Metrica (free), cloud services (fee based) and “360 for business” which is a virtual workspace (fee based).
BOTTOM LEFT CORNER
EMAIL ICON
Link to your Yandex email account.
NOTIFICATION ICON
Messages from Yandex relating to the domains you have installed in your webmaster account.
QUESTION MARK ICON
Support chat but it looks like its in Russian only, no English translation.
GEAR ICON
You can delegate access to your domain domain here to a person that has an existing username in Yandex.
There is also a quick link to setup Metrica tags for the site and/or turn on crawling website pages with tags installed.
Summary
To improve your website management skills you must understand and excel with analytics.
First, search for your website in Google and then do the same search in Yandex. What do you notice about the search results?
Next, do another search for something other than your business in Google. Now, do that same search in Yandex. What do you notice about the search results?
Second, create an account with the Yandex webmaster tool and run your website through their analytics. It will take some time to index the new site. Once that process is completed you will see results that vary from Google search console.
Third, consider the “website authority” that Yandex is today. Do you want that reputation to influence your website ranking? Yes, you do.
Website Authority This is not a myth but it does cover a few chapters of material and notions to understand it fully. Ask AI about it when you have time. I did, just now, and I will give you that first paragraph.
“Website authority is a measure of how likely a website is to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs). It is calculated using various metrics, including:
- Domain Authority (DA): Developed by Moz, this metric predicts the likelihood of a website appearing in SERPs and is scored on a scale from 1 to 100.
- Domain Rating (DR): Ahrefs' proprietary metric, which estimates the site's "link popularity" compared to other websites, also on a scale of 0 to 100.
- Authority Score: Semrush's metric, which combines factors like link quality, organic traffic, and spam presence to create an accurate measure of a website's authority.”
~ Perplexity
This search console is one of my favorite online marketing tools. I think Yandex has made it very easy to use, especially in more techie areas like creating tags and even the code to create membership content with tokens. This is a powerful tool in my website administration and I am seeing positive results from my efforts with it.
My intention is that you learned something to benefit your business website operations and online marketing knowledge with this article. If this content was not helpful to you, send me an email and tell me.
Steu Mann
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