Recently, Yandex, the Russian search engine built as a “clone” of Google by its former employees, suffered a data leak where 1,922 ranking factors were revealed.
Although they also have many differences, Google and Yandex searches have a similarity in 70% of the results.
For SEO professionals, it’s a big event, since to understand how some algorithms actually work goes far beyond basic information like “make humanized content”. We know that it goes far beyond that, and understanding how some of these factors actually work can make all the difference in our daily lives.
Even though the two search engines are similar in results, they are quite different in terms of search ranking factors. If a factor in Yandex is “x”, then in Google it can be “y”. So be careful how you use this information! See which ones can actually be useful in your day to day work and use them to your advantage.
Yandex ranking factors
It is possible to see all Yandex ranking factors here. I suggest downloading this file, as it is usually said that Yandex can take this information offline. Despite being 1,922 factors, 244 were categorized as “unused” and are no longer considered by the mechanism. Also, 988 are deprecated. Therefore, 64% of the document is not actually used, but it is still very important.
In addition to SEO knowledge, knowledge of code is required to understand the document in depth. However, here is some info that might be of interest:
Page ranking: PageRank is the first ranking factor listed in the document. Yandex uses PageRank as a ranking factor, and given how many “Google” tactics work, it can be assumed that Yandex PageRank works the same way as Google.
Relevance of the text: Another important point and close to Google is the relevance of the content. How relevant can that content be to the user? Is it useful?
URL construction: Links are very important in Yandex and this is listed in over 130 search engine factors. The URL must contain a semantic relationship to the user’s query, and in addition, the use of numbers in the link can be negative. These are just two examples.
Some of the ranking factors that are different from what we are used to seeing are:
- number of unique visitors
- percentage of organic traffic
- average domain rank in queries
For those who know English (and if not, you can use the Twitter translation), Alex Buraks made two threads about these and other ranking factors. It is worth taking a look!
What did you think? Do you think it’s possible to have more news about Yandex that could make a difference? We may see more and more studies and news about this soon. I believe that it’s not only artificial intelligence that Google should keep an eye on, but now it has one more “problem” on its radar, as Yandex is already making waves.
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