Google is catching up with Yandex by challenging its market share in Russia and Yandex is beginning to fight back.

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Yandex is undoubtedly the search engine of choice in Russia and nearby countries with 60% market share for the simple reason that it can connect to users from that area better. In a September 2014 report though it appears that Google is catching up with Yandex by challenging its market share. In response, Yandex has begun to fight back. One, it is luring advertisers from other regions to come in and reap the benefits of being associated with Yandex and two, by offering a cost-effective and responsive SEO process.

Four Main SEO Differences

The main differences between these 2 search engine giants (Top 1 and 4) can be pinned down to 4: linguistic, link farming, keyword density and content, and indexing.

Linguistics: Linguistics refers to the language the search engine targets based on demographics of most of its users. In the case of Yandex, the main language (or the default language) is Russian seeing that it was created for this particular market. Google, on the other hand, gives users a choice and although the default language is in English, Google offers the local language based on the location of the user.

With Russian users, Google has a distinct disadvantage with linguistics in that it is not as adept with the syntax of the Russian language as Yandex is. Thus the filtering efforts of Google are not as refined as that of Yandex. In fact, it can frustrate a Google user with its search results.

Link Farming: Optimizing links is the second difference between Google and Yandex. As most Google users are aware, the company has been hell-bent on going after black-hat SEO methods, most particularly with link farming. In contrast, Google favors backlink strengths as one of the better ways of optimizing links because it demands high quality from this type of SEO work. Yandex, on the other hand, has shifted away from high quality links to on-site technical optimization and outstanding, top value content, especially with commercial searches.

Keyword Density: The third difference is in the algorithm for keyword content and density which is of great important if you want to rank high in Yandex. However, Yandex is not interested in content stuffed with keywords rather quality and unique content with a proper dose of relevant keywords. Google prefers to lean more on backlink strength and keyword relevance with minimal to zero technical errors. Google has also become fierce with duplicate content while preferring long-tail keyword searches as one of the key ways to streamline searches for its users.

Indexing: Finally, indexing between Google and Yandex is evident with the speed of new content. Yandex is slower in displaying search results for new pages even as it has a smaller index than Google. Latest research estimate that Yandex index is about 2 billion pages while Google has about 40 billion.

Which search engine is better? At the moment, it would really depend on your target market or search requirements.