Yandex Webmaster Interface – An SEO Gold Mine

Following the quiet release of Yandex to the English speaking search market, I’ve done some digging and found the Webmaster interface.

The site is in Russian, however Google translate does an excellent job of translating to English.   The only problem is that the text on the buttons isn’t translated due to them being bitmaps, however you can usually guess the function.

Take the front page as an example – the green button is a fairly obvious first step:

The first step is to register a username – the process is fairly straightforward and only takes a few minutes:

Once you’re logged in – the main things to watch for are “My Sites” and “Add Site”.   The Add site process is similar to Google, giving you the option of uploading a text file to the website or adding a meta tag.

Once registered you’re presented with all kinds of stats – just like with the Google Webmaster interface:

Here’s the full list of available statistics/reports available from the left hand menu:

As you can see – a wealth of information and plenty to keep an SEO busy for a while!

One little thing that caught my eye was a reference to a statistic “TIC”.   Turns out that this is a citation index that Yandex use to rank pages.     Here’s their description:

Citation index (or IC) – adopted in the scientific world a measure of "importance" of works of a scientist. The value of the index is determined by the number of references to this work (or name) in other sources. However, for truly accurate determination of the significance of scientific works is important not only number references to them, but quality these links. Thus, the work may invoke an authoritative academic publication, a popular pamphlet, or entertainment magazine. The importance of such links is different.

Our theme citation index (CY) defines "authority" of Internet resources based on qualitative characteristics of links to them from other sites. This qualitative feature we call "weight" links. The formula is specially developed algorithm. Important role played thematic affinity resource and reference it sites. In itself, the number of links to resources also affects the value of its CY, but CY is not determined number options, and the sum of their Weights.

CY as a means of determining the credibility of resources designed to ensure the relevance of the location of resources under the headings Yandex directory. CY is not a purely quantitative characteristic, so we show some of the rounded values that help to navigate the "importance" ("authority") resources in each area (theme).

The idea is simple citation index – usually the people who create a website on the internet, with the attention and responsibility related to its content, as well as to the content of what they refer to, and thereby encourage their visitors. Our thematic index takes into account the number of links to the site from other sites, making these links is different "weight" (ie value) depending on the credibility of the referring sites.

I’ll certainly be investigating this more over the next few days as will many others in the SEO industry.   From first looks, Yandex is going to make a big impression!

Yandex Webmaster Interface