Yandex: "New Principles of commercial sites ranging"

December 5th, 2011 11:18 AM

Yandex: "New principles of commercial sites ranging"

The tenth annual conference entitled "SEO optimization and site promotion on the Internet" took place in Moscow on the 24th – 25th of November 2011.

Alexander Sadovsky, the leader of Yandex web-search, made a report dedicated to the issue: "New principles of commercial sites ranging".

At the very beginning of his speech, Alexander pointed out, that this time he did not want to give statements about the things that can be read on Yandex blogs, instead of being eager and to set boundaries for*the issue that could be interesting for listeners from the “commercial point of view.” For this purpose he spoke about innovations in the search algorithm that came into force just a few days ago.

What is a good informative response? It is the quality of information (such as inner consistency, urgent character, "freshness", ease at perception, and so on), but we face another situation on commercial queries. That is why a good commercial website is a web resource that helps users not only to compare but also to lead.

Users usually do not pay attention to the most important things from the SE point of view. They used to worry about off-line issues such as terms of delivery, availability of the goods at stocks etc. These off-line issues haven’t been considered yet by search engines algorithm.

What algorithm does any search engine use to indicate a good site? They do it automatically, relying upon specific statistic data. They elaborate a certain instruction for the assessor, and then they manually create an example of how it should work - that is how a search system distinguishes a good site from a bad one.
Actually, a search tool can be compared with a blind person – it uses touch, an experience and a test case to define and act.

Then the algorithm of site ranging selects the most important information parameters. If we compare the results that is provided when ranging commercial websites like if they are informational, we’ll notice that the commercial sites have got a positive remark, because a site of good quality always differs from a bad one or even an average one.

Today an assessor estimates a commercial site relying upon a variety of criteria – it’s an assortment, users’ trust, the quality of a given service, the design of the home page and many other things. Such algorithm was introduced on the 20th of November 2011. It works upon Moscow queries and deals with 3 % of all commercial searches.

What does a commercial website strive for? It is as clear as a diamond: for being the best of its category. Unfortunately, there are no universal criteria for this and any kind of comparison is relative. SEO should be at the centre of attention in any case. It’s important to invest money into the attraction of clients - advertising. But it’s shouldn’t be done as it had been done before when many people were possessed not to improve the quality of the site but tried to make their sites somewhat similar to some other sites that search engines indicates as high ranked ones. Nowadays, we should attract users not by imitation or duplications of sites (design, content, style) but by an improvement of the quality of the web-resource.

Now, Yandex team is aspiring for the situation when the traffic that are driven by site will directly show its quality. It’s implementing with many queries and soon it will be applied to all queries.

Assessors give bad rank to the sites relying upon the total absence of design or contact information. They don’t find them to be reliable. In case if you add the contact information - the resource will receive better rank points.

If the site has a convenient system to choose product categories, a map with physical address location, simple samples of how to make an order – that underlines that the site is thoroughly elaborated, and gets attention and investments. In this case the assessors will give it a high rank.

In the middle of his performance, Alexander also spoke about comparison of the ranking given by optimizers from one hand and assessors from another hand. He’s having mentioned that in most cases their remarks are the same, because they view sites from the similar perspectives relying on the similar criteria. That’s why optimizers should make the sites so that they drew their attention. Only in this case these sites will be high ranked by assessors. Those who start their way in SEO should tend to make the sites of good quality instead of making them similar to others.

"Even if your site is high ranked, optimizers should always hold the cards and tend to keep their sun spot." Here are the final and exhaustive quotes made by Mr. Sadovsky:

Mr. Sadovsky - There are a few changes that are to be taken into consideration immediately (concerning adding of contact information), but there are also inert factors such as intake of information that should be taken into account as well.

The audience: - You’ve spoken about the fact that there’s a new algorithm of ranging has being launched. But it obviously means that we’ll deal with imitation, because we will have to make sites similar to those ones that are on the top. Let’s assume that I have a very good site but it doesn’t look like those sites that are on the top, will it turn out to be there?

Mr. Sadovsky: - Every site that tends to be a good one will be on the top! Don’t imitate other sites; just improve the quality of your sites! Don’t waste your time on that.

The audience: Do “Like”s, and “Share”s functions influence on the ranging results for commercial sites?
Mr. Sadovsky: - Not yet. But we are thinking they might have a glue. We are planning to take advantages of cooperation with social networks.

The audience: How does this statement face nowadays trends that rating the quality of site’s content is made relying upon synonyms’ usage criteria, in order to suppress them or for the sake of increasing of the quantity of the content that is relevant to site’s idea and might be interesting to visitors.
Mr. Sadovsky: 100% true. It should be taking into consideration but don’t be busy with trifles! Try to write comprehensive and informative content!

The audience: Will the system that identifies good and bad sites from the commercial point of view be applied to the blogs?
Mr. Sadovsky: Yes, sure it will. We are working on it. But it’s not an issue that will run in 2-3 months, because obviously blogs are more difficult to deal with.

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