100DOSEO #7

Tha Yandex leak edition 😴

James Ewen 🤘 🔍

Jan 31, 2023

Alright, let’s talk about that Yandex leak.

Before I do, yes, I know that Yandex isn’t Google.

I understand that this leak is not spilling the juice on exactly how search engines work.

But it’s not just a random research project. As SEOs, we can learn a lot about how a modern search engine works.

And that’s what’s interesting about it, before it was mainly conjecture regarding how these beasts work.

Someone would post something that worked for their site, and many people would take this as gospel.

Not understanding that what works for one site may not work for another.

But what we have here is in black and white (or whatever your code editor theme is) ~~1,922~~ ~~2000~~ 17,854 ranking factors to dig into. And that’s at least mildly interesting, no?

So what have I found interesting in this?

Search engines seem to hate ads, even if those ads are its parent company’s main source of income. Look, this makes sense. We all dislike a site with too many ads, it’s been said before.
Older content is better, as are older links. SEO work ages like a fine wine.
Guys focus on your anchor text. Over-engineering SEO links will not work.
Local queries require local answers.
A lot has been made about Yandex depreciating link-based ranking factors altogether before bringing it back. I don’t think links are going anywhere quickly.
There are anti-SEO upper bounds, so in theory, Google could be implementing a similar system for combating badly executed SEO work.

These are all elements of what might potentially make up the ranking factors of one search engine (that accounts for a relatively small amount of global searches).

Most of what I just nulled above is really common SEO best practices.

So how should we react?

I think, as general guidance, it’s good to know that search engines use some of what we consider best practices to rank our site(s).

My guess is that a lot of these factors are ultimately unverifiable in that they are high-level and ill-defined.

For example, one mentions a ratio between good and bad links as a ranking factor.

Anyone knows this. What we don’t know is how search engines perceive a good and a bad link.

And that’s the crux of it for me - definitely worth wasting a few days digging into it, and it may help to focus the mind where you might have lapsed on best practices.

I’d recommend this post for a good round-up for further reading as well as this sheet and this site to dig deep into the factors themselves.