• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 22, 2017

Yandex's latest announcement on Wednesday signals a push to help publishers attract readership from search. On Wednesday the company announced Turbo-pages to help publishers increase page download speeds, especially for pages with heavy content that is slowing down mobile browsers.

The company claims that content now loads 15 times faster on 3G compared with a standard mobile web page. The pages have 10 times less content than standard HTML web pages carrying images and video, and it features ad blocks for contextual and banner ads that can be placed through Yandex and ADFOX.

In an email to Search Marketing Daily, Turbo-page product head Ivan Smirnov wrote as more people go online, site visitors in Russia continue to rely more heavily on mobile, similar to users in the United States. Increasing page-load speeds can only improve the experience, he wrote.  

Yandex launched Turbo-pages for Yandex Browser in 2016 and has since been conducting experiments to integrate Turbo-pages for publishers in search. Internal data shows that Turbo-pages decrease by 30% the number of cases where a site visitor closes a slow-loading page before it opens. It also shows to increase traffic and ad views for publishers.

The pages initially appeared, marked by a missile icon, in Yandex.News. Now they are accessible from Search and Zen. Ads can be monitored through Yandex.Metrica, Google Analytics, and Mediascope.

Turbo-pages accelerates the download of content on mobile devices, similar to Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project. They are designed just for mobile currently, with more than 350 news sources now using Turbo-pages in Yandex.News,

The service also is available in Yandex search and Yandex.Zen, although the company does not yet have statistics for applications outside Yandex.News.

The company also likes the technology to Facebook Instant Articles, insists it's easier to implement and offers publishers out-of-the box monetization.