Granconsult

Behavioral Ranking Factors

Promotion methods in the Russian internet fall into “white” and “black” camps. White methods are when a site is built for people — with personalization, aimed at the target audience.

Why are white methods hard? White promotion takes time, and the time lost can be astronomical. You can earn excellent links by writing great content — the question is how long it will take. You can earn great behavioral signals by improving usability and pushing every interface to perfection — but how many years will that take, and will you get the traffic in time? Meanwhile competitors using purchased links, boosted behavioral signals or gamed social signals can capture clients, stay in the top results and harvest traffic — at the risk of being banned.

Today there are no serious bans for behavioral-factor manipulation. Yandex mostly ignores sudden link surges. If a site is trust-worthy enough, you cannot kill it with behavioral manipulation. Using dark methods the worst-case scenario is getting nothing; the best case is strong traffic, visitors and an audience.

All paid methods can also be achieved organically — at the cost of significant time.

Overall manipulation statistics: Yandex accounts for 52%, Google 32%, link amplification 15%. Vendor-targeted boosts run about 1,000 queries per day.

People trust bots more than humans for behavioral manipulation (66% automated vs. 34% live humans). In the latter case a person is given a task — visit a site, take a screenshot, read a page — and no analytics system can distinguish real visitors paid to click from real visitors who click for their own reasons. Manual methods are the most reliable.

Geo-independent queries are slightly easier to promote than geo-dependent (9.2 vs. 8.4). By region Moscow leads (68%), Saint Petersburg is second (16%).

Queries by brand or domain name are also significant — they shift the overall site rating. About 6% of users focus specifically on this type of manipulation. The rest do standard boosting. Sites with many domain-name queries tend to have very good impression effectiveness in Yandex — you see them well in all other queries too. This observation is debated.

White-hat behavioral-factor methods: boosting search-suggestions, the “inside-out” method, and boosting groups and communities on social networks.

The whitest and safest methods — for which no penalties can be applied — are boosting search suggestions.

The second method is “inside-out”: boost the number of searches for the queries on which you already rank first.

Boosting social-network groups is popular, primarily in Google. For a mid-frequency query, create a group with an exact match of the search phrase, drive ~200 people into it, start discussions and traffic. After two weeks Google automatically places the group around position 20. Then boost behavioral signals, push it to the top — and you have a top-ranked group driving traffic without exposing your main site.

Common mistakes: over-boosting click counts by more than 70% of natural traffic, and poor on-site optimization.

You can combine behavioral and social signals. Social-network boosts — posts, groups and so on — can drive traffic that Yandex counts and factors into ranking.

Yandex considers about 1,000 factors today — direct manipulation is only one. There are also indirect tactics. Example: search for the keyword “broken iPhone” — find people with broken iPhones, message each with an offer about a fast, quality repair shop — no links. They can find the company by name. You may earn a completely natural behavioral signal from real people interested in a fast repair, plus customers.

The top three networks account for 75% of boost traffic. VKontakte leads — you can create a group and push it to the top of organic SERPs, plus the user base is huge. Twitter serves indexing and complex link-boost patterns. Facebook can add a couple of dozen clients.

Ways to strengthen natural behavioral signals via social channels: avoid links and work with search queries inside social networks.

The most popular VKontakte task is joining a group — both to boost it in organic search and for psychological reasons (nobody joins empty groups; 1,000 members feels normal). Popular tasks also include a wall post, repost, the VKontakte button and the Like button. VKontakte comments work least.

Twitter beat VKontakte. For SEO audiences Twitter is the most serious and interesting tool today — you can fast-track indexing of your pages. If you bought links and need them indexed quickly, order a tweet for each — your whole list gets reindexed within five hours. The site’s Twitter button and the “Retweet” button are also popular.

The simplest tactic is creating a popular tweet — the strongest impact you can achieve on Twitter. Links from popular tweets carry special weight. Done through retweets, replies and favorites.

On Facebook the most popular tasks are posts, group joins, likes, the Share button and comments.

Google+ offers a popular option — sharing a search result to recommend it to others. Manipulation rate is high (27%). The Google+ button is popular (35%). Likes and posts in Google+ are also used. This is the only social network where posts rank last.

On YouTube you can comment on any video, then add several likes — the comment rises to the top. Done at scale — today the most popular YouTube task is liking. Simple way to get free links from YouTube under others’ videos, if the video owner does not delete the comment (happens in ~10% of cases).

For Mail.ru promotion use Mail.ru buttons, blog posts, Moi Mir posts — they work great. To be top on Mail.ru — buy Mail.ru ads.

Tasks in the Yandex social network are also very popular: the “Я” button, blog posts, comments. You can buy comments on Yandex.Market too — very popular task. You can buy good reviews of your product even if nobody has seen it.

Around last year the idea came up to gamify App Store and Google Play. Turns out they boost excellently — especially the App Store, which has almost no defenses. You can register unlimited accounts and comment. Mobile apps can be pushed to the top of charts. The system also works well in Google Play.

Yandex regularly releases mobile apps — Yandex.Navigator, Yandex.Elektrichki. When you use the apps they remind you it was built by Yandex — so when you search you use Yandex. I’d advise large brands to build cool, useful, free, easy-to-access mobile apps — a great source of great clients.

TOP-40 popular tasks in social networks:

  1. Twitter post — 12.30%
  2. Join VKontakte group/community — 9.50%
  3. VKontakte wall post — 8.10%
  4. “Tell friends” VKontakte — 7.90%
  5. Site Twitter button — 5%
  6. Facebook wall post — 4.80%
  7. Google/Share site button — 3.60%
  8. Site Yandex button — 3.30%
  9. VKontakte Like — 3.20%
  10. Retweet — 3.20%
  11. Site VKontakte button — 3%
  12. Google+ share from SERP — 2.90%
  13. Facebook Like — 2.90%
  14. Join Facebook group — 2.90%
  15. Subscribe / Followers — 2.70%
  16. Site Facebook button — 2.70%
  17. Facebook share — 2.40%
  18. ya.ru blog post — 2.30%
  19. YouTube Like — 2%
  20. Google+ +1 — 1.80%
  21. VKontakte poll vote — 1.70%
  22. Twitter reply by search query — 1.30%
  23. Google+ wall post — 1.30%
  24. Site Mail button — 1.20%
  25. Mail.ru blog post — 1.10%
  26. Odnoklassniki post — 1%
  27. Comment on ya.ru blog post — 0.90%
  28. Join Odnoklassniki group — 0.90%
  29. Moi Mir post — 0.50%
  30. Rate with comment a free App Store app — 0.50%
  31. VKontakte reply by search query — 0.40%
  32. Blogger.com post — 0.30%
  33. Subscribe to YouTube channel — 0.20%
  34. Rate with review a free Google Play app — 0.20%
  35. Yandex.Market comment — 0.10%
  36. Favorites — 0.10%
  37. YouTube comment — 0.10%
  38. Facebook comment — 0.10%
  39. Diary.ru post — 0.10%
  40. VKontakte comment — 0.10%