What is Yandex and why do I care?

[Ron_McCabe]

I noticed in a recent Q&A response that along with Bing and Google web master tools there was a reference to Yandex. What is the relevance of this webmaster tool set? Is there a cost associated with it?  If so is it worth it? I would love to hear what the community thinks.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Yandex is Russia's answer to Google.  Can give you data and you can rank and it just like any other search engine however it is specific to Russia.

If you do a lot of international search you would care quite a bit. It also has some unique local tools that are not as good as MozLocal however not bad at all. Compared to most local toolsets. If you find yourself in Europe or Russia and or need to target that area you will want to be friends with Yandex.

I use it it has some pretty cool tools.

Hope that helps,

Tom

[RyanPurkey]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex  The webmaster tools it hosts are free: https://webmaster.yandex.com/  Just another search engine based service to help with crawling, linking and miscellaneous tools.  If your site is non-international it's probably not much of a worry as they're mostly a Russia-based search provider.

[DRSearchEngOpt]

Yandex holds onto about 60+% market share in Russia for Search Engines and a few years ago (2013) was only one of four countries to where Google was not number one for market share. (http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2013-search-engine-market-share-by-country/)

As was said above, they also provide some tools similar to Google like Email, Docs, etc... and also provide a webmaster tools section for site owners similar to Google as well.  (I don't believe there to be a cost associated with the Webmaster Tools.) It also has been quite successful on unlocked Android phones in comparison to other SE's in other regions around the world.

One of the caveats that help really project Yandex to the top of Russia's SE use is the ability to parse through the Russian language differently and some would argue, better than Google.  It also claims to not utilize links in their algorithm due to the high volume of linkspam in Russia.  More about the nuanced differences has been published online but a high level article can be found here: http://www.semrush.com/blog/publications/5-advantages-yandex-google-russia/

If you are not trying to work within Russia deal with Russian then Yandex should not be of too much of a concern. The nuanced differences never hurt to learn though and these region specific SE's such as NAVER and Baidu are going to become more important in the future, or that is my guess at least, as the populations expand.  But hey, I am not Nostradamus either.