Andrew Dunn
February 26, 2023
In this newsletter, we will discuss the recent Yandex code leak and its impact on the SEO industry.
If you work in the SEO industry, it's essential to stay updated with the latest news that may affect your work. The recent Yandex code leak is significant as it may offer valuable insights into how search engines work and how SEO experts can optimize their sites to rank higher in search results.
Many SEO experts focus on optimizing their sites solely for the one or two ranking factors they think are important (most likely having the right keywords and the right number of them). But the Yandex leak shows us there are a variety of factors you need to optimize for.
Yandex is the Russian form of Google and part or their code was leaked.
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The recent Yandex code leak has revealed some significant insights into how search engines operate and how SEO experts can optimize their sites to rank higher in Yandex's search results.
If you haven’t read the full report, here are the most important takeaways that I think could affect SEO on our side of the planet.
The Yandex code leak involved almost 50GB of stolen data, including the source codes of all Yandex services.
The leak may offer valuable insights into how Yandex operates its search engine, which may impact the SEO industry in the western world.
According to SEO experts, the most interesting part of the leak is the 1922 search ranking factors, which can help SEO experts optimize their sites for Yandex's search results.
Yandex and Google follow similar algorithms, but there are technical differences that may affect how SEO experts optimize their sites for Yandex's search results.
Yandex has a considerable market share in Russia and other countries, making it essential for SEO experts to optimize their sites for Yandex's search results.
The recent cyber attacks on Russian companies, including Yandex, highlight the need for better cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive data from hackers.
The Yandex leak gave those of us in SEO a treasure trove of information about how massive search engines rank articles. We can then use this information to get our sites and articles to rank higher. And isn’t that what SEO is all about?
The Yandex Leak is a big deal.
Let’s Dive In Deeper
Obviously, those of us in the SEO world are interested in how to use search engine ranking factors to get ranked higher. Since Google and Yandex happen to be similar (a lot of Yandex coders previously worked for Google) in the ranking factors they use, the SEO world wanted to know what those factors are.
Here are the factors that Yandex uses that probably mimic Google’s algorithms:
Yandex uses meta keywords.
Yandex has specific factors for medical, legal, and financial topics.
It uses page quality scoring.
Links from high-authority websites have a more significant impact on page rankings.
Server errors and excessive 4xx errors can impact ranking.
Time of day when publishing is taken into consideration as a ranking factor.
Yandex takes URL construction into consideration such as, the presence of numbers in the URL, the number of trailing slashes in the URL (and if they are excessive), and the number of capital letters in the URL are all ranking factors.
There’s evidence that Google and Yandex give less weight to any page that is more than one click from your homepage.
There are specific click factors in the leak look at things like the ratio of the number of clicks on the URL, relative to all clicks on the search and also broken down by region, and how often users click on the URL for the search.
Yandex had a filter that penalized websites for “click-jacking.”
Yandex penalizes user behaviour manipulation with the same PF filter used to combat CTR manipulation.
Yandex SEO's best practices for link building involve a more natural, varied approach rather than an onslaught of the same kinds of links.
Anchor texts should contain both branded terms and commercial keywords when applicable.
Sources from websites that are solely related to the topic you're working on will help drive higher rankings with this search engine.
Yandex penalized websites with too many ads taking up space on pages.
The recent Yandex code leak has provided some valuable insights into how search engines work and how SEO experts can optimize their sites for Yandex's search results. It's crucial for you to use all this information when writing articles for your sites because there is a great chance that Google operates on similar parameters.
Yandex - The Russian Google
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Not only did the Yandex leak provide us with the ranking factors that Google probably uses, they also gave us confirmation that the practices we thought were good to get ranked higher are good.
Here’s a quick list of the link-related factors that the Yandex leak confirmed to be good practices:
Backlink age is a factor that should be taken into consideration.
The relevance of links should be based on topics.
Backlinks from home pages are more important than internal pages.
Backlinks from the top 100 websites by PageRank can affect rankings.
The quality of each link should be considered for link relevance.
Link relevance should be based on the quality and topic of each link.
The non-commercial nature of each link should be considered for link relevance.
The percentage of inbound links with query words should be measured.
Links with query words or their synonyms should be counted.
Links that include all the query words (or synonyms) are important.
Dispersion of the number of query words in links should be taken into account.
The Yandex leak was a unique event that provided a rare look into how search engines rank articles. Google is extremely secretive about how its algorithms work, so this leak was great news for anyone wondering how to get ahead in SEO.
I know I made notes and will try to write my articles to fit these parameters.
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