Yandex – the 4th largest search engine worldwide was breached and around 1922 ranking factors were leaked by a former employee. This is the most trending news for the SEO community as some of these ranking factors are similar to our familiar search engine giant – Google.
What is that leaked data?
The leaked torrent file contains Yandex git sources and 44.7 GB of data. This data includes technical data on different products of the Russian tech company. The list of products is as follows –
- Yandex search engine and indexing bot
- Yandex Maps
- Alice (AI assistant)
- Yandex Taxi
- Yandex Direct (ads service)
- Yandex Mail
- Yandex Disk (cloud storage service)
- Yandex Market
- Yandex Travel (travel booking platform)
- Yandex360 (workspaces service)
- Yandex Cloud
- Yandex Pay (payment processing service)
- Yandex Metrika (website analytics service)
This is not the first time the Russian tech giant has been under a cyber attack. In 2016, someone was selling the account data of 6.3 million Yandex users. Furthermore, in 2021 Yandex was hit by one of the largest DDoS attacks.
What did Yandex Said?
The company officials have denied the information of the system being hacked stating –
“Yandex was not hacked. Our security service found code fragments from an internal repository in the public domain, but the content differs from the current version of the repository used in Yandex services.
A repository is a tool for storing and working with code. Code is used in this way internally by most companies.
Repositories are needed to work with code and are not intended for the storage of personal user data. We are conducting an internal investigation into the reasons for the release of source code fragments to the public, but we do not see any threat to user data or platform performance.”
How are Leaked Yandex Ranking Factors Beneficial?
The list of over 1900 ranking factors has some amazing factors that you might not know.
Even if it is not Google, Yandex was built as a Google clone, making this news super important. Since most of the feature and ranking metrics of both of these search engines are the same, these leaked data can be useful for the SEO community to get helpful insights that can be implemented in their SEO practices.
Leaked Yandex Ranking Factors
Page Ranking
As per this leaked ranking factor the overall page ranking of your site is considered as one of the rankings for new pages.
Crawl Depth
Crawl depth is how many pages a search engine bot can index at a time. According to this ranking factor, your crawl depth should be high or you should keep the important pages near the homepage of the website hierarchy.
Backlink Anchor
If the anchor of your backlink contains all the words of your targeted keywords, it can be helpful for SEO.
Number of Bad Links
It is a common factor for almost every search engine. Reduce the number of bad and spammy links on your website.
Links with Exact Match
The number of links in your webpage that has an exact match with the search query.
Geographical Searches
It is to determine whether the sites have the same geographical location for the search query.
SEO Content
This sounds similar to Google’s helpful content update, where the search engine giant states to make content useful for humans and not for SEO guidelines to rank higher.
Ranking Factor for Wikipedia
Yandex will prefer Wikipedia for informational content as there is a different factor for it.
Link Age
The age of the link is another ranking factor. The backlinks with ages between 3 -7 years can be valuable for you.
Snippet
A snippet is a small presentation of a webpage on a search engine result page. The ranking factor is based on how high-quality snippets can be made from the content available on your webpage.
Old Date in URL
If the URL of your webpage contains an old date, it will be considered an old document which might not be that useful. And then its chances of ranking will be low.
Website Traffic and New Visitors
The overall website traffic and number of unique visitors can affect your ranking. Running PPC ads can be beneficial to attract new visitors.
Numbers in URL
Avoid adding numbers in your URLs as they can lower the ranking
Number of Slashes in URL
Avoid using multiple slashes in your URL; it can affect the ranking of your site.
Host Reliability
Host reliability is decided based on the number of URLs without any errors.
Local Search Queries
This factor is related to local search queries and is also applicable to Google. Your web content must be relevant to query when someone searches for “near me” on “in the particular city.”
Backlinks from Main Pages
The number of backlinks from the main pages plays an important role in the overall ranking.
Non-letters in URL
Avoid the non-letters like @, #, $, %, etc in your site URL.
CTR of your site
This is also applicable to Google. The average CTR, bounce rate, and user time are some crucial factors that are responsible for ranking.
Publishing and Update Month
The month of publishing and updating content plays a crucial role.
Host (Domain) Position & Searches
The host/domain position and the number of search queries for your site are ranking factors.
Visits from Wikipedia
Bookmarks
How many users bookmark your site can affect its ranking.
Ranking for short videos
There is a separate ranking factor for pages with short videos like TikTok, Reels, and shorts)
? Symbol in URL
Avoid using the “?” symbol in your URLs.
Dots and Spaces in URL
Avoid using Dots and Spaces in URLs.
Map API on Web pages
Availability of Map APIs (like Google Maps) wherever necessary is a ranking factor.
Content Quality
Not a new thing. The quality of content on your site is a ranking factor.
Advertisements on Your Site
The number of ads on your site is a ranking factor.
Backlinks from the top 100 Websites
If your website has backlink/s from the top 100 websites, it has a high chance of ranking.
Summing Up
Here I have shared some common ranking factors from the huge leaked data. Some of these factors you might already know, but I’m sure a lot of them are surprising to you. There is a lot of helpful information that can be helpful to us.
However, even if Yandex is not Google there are many factors listed above that are applicable to Google. So why not let us try the remaining as well?
