Hardcore SEO in the CIS: How Sites Were Promoted in 2009 and What Changed by 2026
In 2009, the whole Russian-speaking internet was sharing a video called “Russian SEO” — a parody of the Russian musical film “Stilyagi” (Hipsters, 2008). In a couple of minutes it showed the daily life of an SEO specialist: his wishes, dreams and hopes, and of course the strictness of Yandex, the main search engine in Russia and much of the CIS :-). Back then I posted it here with the words “Respect to the creator!”
Today the video is blocked on YouTube after a complaint from the film’s rights holder, so all that’s left is memories. But we can remember what the SEO it was making fun of looked like.
More than 15 years have passed since then. Let’s look at how sites were promoted back then and what has changed — this blog, by the way, has lived through every one of these eras.
How sites were promoted in 2009
- Links were everything. People bought them by the thousands on link exchanges, “rented” them monthly, and judged sites by Yandex’s TIC score and Google’s PageRank.
- Directory submissions — a site was registered in hundreds of web directories at once to collect links.
- Texts written for robots: “buy cheap plastic windows Moscow” ten times per paragraph, keywords in meta keywords, and white text on a white background.
- Satellites and junk sites — networks of empty sites created only to place links.
How search engines tightened the screws
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2009 | Yandex launches the AGS filter against satellites and useless sites — junk sites drop out of the index en masse. |
| 2011 | Google Panda hits sites with low-quality and duplicate content. |
| 2012 | Google Penguin penalizes bought and spammy links. |
| 2015 | Yandex introduces Minusinsk — penalties for SEO links. |
| 2016 | Google stops showing PageRank publicly. |
| 2017 | Yandex Baden-Baden targets over-optimized texts stuffed with keywords. |
| 2018 | Yandex drops TIC and introduces the site quality index IKS. |
| 2021 | Google takes page speed and usability into account — Core Web Vitals. |
| 2024 | AI answers appear in search: AI Overviews at Google and Neuro at Yandex. |
SEO in 2026
- Usefulness beats keywords. Search engines judge whether a page solves the user’s problem, not how many times the query appears on it.
- Author experience. Texts written by people who actually did what they write about are valued — like the notes on this blog.
- Speed and phones. A site has to load fast and look right on a smartphone.
- AI in search results. People get some answers right on the results page, so now the fight is to be the source an AI cites.
What hasn’t changed
Hardcore SEO specialists haven’t gone anywhere — instead of directory submissions, they now discuss E-E-A-T, load speed and getting into AI answers. And their hopes and dreams, just like in that video, are the same: reach the top and stay there :-).
Tell us in the comments which SEO tricks from 2009 you remember!
