Search Engine Journal Report: International SEO in 2020

A new article on Search Engine Journal brings the take of some international SEO pros about optimizing for Google and Yandex.



Optimization 2020 is in its 18th year as a conference and probably the largest digital marketing gathering in Russia, but it usually gets ignored or forgotten in the West. This year's conference hosted some of the best Russian marketers and representatives from Google and Yandex. The author says talks focused on optimizing for both Google and Yandex - and there was a virtual roundtable attended by several leading Russian SEO professionals.

Key Takeaways: Ranking Factors - Yandex vs. Google

• The ranking factors identified in 2019 remained relevant to 2020.
• The effect of links within Yandex appears to have lessened, whereas it has remained the same within Google.
• Perceived website (and business) quality has become a much stronger factor in both Google and Yandex.
• On mobile, site speed appears to be more important to Google than Yandex, but in the case of the latter, the number of Turbo pages has increased greatly (outside of the top 3 results).
• Both Google and Yandex will add more weight to establishing website quality (Google's E-A-T and Yandex's IKS).

Mikhail Slevinsky is head of Yandex Webmaster tools. When asked by roundtable members whether aggregator websites were an issue for Yandex, Slevinsky said:

Elena Pershina is head of B2B Marketing for Non-Advertising Services at Yandex. In her talk, she noted that websites and businesses, in the view of Yandex, have become separated during the past couple of years - with the site being a proxy for the company as a whole - rather than a pure representation of what it offers.

Pershina added that Yandex has begun working harder to understand businesses' user-generated content and how that relates to businesses.