We’re only 2 full weeks into the year, and Yandex has already been making the headlines with new SERP features and market statistics.
This is your whistle-stop roundup of the important things you might have missed from the past week in regards to Yandex search marketing, and RuNet users.
Recap
During the past week, Yandex have kicked off the Alice Skills Hackathon (13th), which is sure to bring some of the brightest minds and again further development of the Alice voice assistant and it’s capabilities.
RSN also covered the new XML calculating updates, being rolled out at the end of the month.
Webmasters began to notice a new feature on search results pages, allowing users to filter their query results to only show webpages catering towards a commercial intent. This was then later confirmed as a rollout, and not beta, with some explanation as to why it has been introduced. This feature was accompanied by a new Direct CTA, displaying realtime Wordstat search volume data as an incentive to bid on the keyword through paid search.
During the week we also saw a number of Webmasters reporting a greater than normal flux in traffic and rankings, as well as some third-party tools suggesting there may have been a small Yandex algorithm update on Jan 11 2021.
RSN News
Talking about Yandex algorithm updates, during the week Russian Search News has published some of it’s most anticipated annual articles, including:
- Our annual Yandex Algorithm Volatility Report
- A new data study showing 11 years of Yandex algorithm update frequency (confirmed and rumoured)
- And an answer to the question, was 2020 a more volatile year for algorithm updates than 2019?
News Elsewhere
Yandex have reported that the number of unique buyers on Yandex.Market has reached 6-million – a change that will affect the wider market place and how users show online, given that Yandex are testing on-click delivery in major population centers.
And finally, Yandex and Mail.ru have faced allegations of abusing their market positions.
