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100DOSEO #7

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100DOSEO #7

Tha Yandex leak edition 😓

James Ewen 🤘 šŸ”
Jan 31, 2023
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Alright, let’s talk about that Yandex leak.

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

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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.


SEO news and content

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Are you looking for SEO help? Just a quick note to say that I’m currently taking on a few new clients. You can reach out to me at james@seotagg.com if you want me to take a personal look at your site/project.


Best of SEO Twitter

Twitter avatar for @ChouinardJC
JC Chouinard @ChouinardJC
We rarely have the chance to have a highly experienced #seo (@mihir23192 ) share such a depth of knowledge in just a few images 🧵 Here is the #contentseo framework
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1:52 PM āˆ™ Jan 27, 2023
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Twitter avatar for @areej_abuali
Areej @areej_abuali
There are two kinds of SEOs: 1) Those who care about the Yandex leak 2) Those who don't care about the Yandex leak And that's okay, because they're both good kinds of people, and they can coexist in harmony by respecting what the other cares/doesn't care about šŸ™ŒšŸ½
7:59 AM āˆ™ Jan 29, 2023
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Twitter avatar for @alex_buraks
Alex Buraks @alex_buraks
You probably heard about Yandex, it’s the 4th biggest search engine by market share worldwide. Yesterday proprietary source code of Yandex was leaked. The most interesting part for SEO community is: the list of all 1922 ranking factors used in the search algorithm [🧵THREAD]
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3:03 PM āˆ™ Jan 27, 2023
5,227Likes1,462Retweets

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