Gary Illyes from the Google Search Relations team posted another PSA on LinkedIn. This time he said, “when you redesign a site, its rankings in search engines may go nuts.”

Yes, this is probably super obvious to most of you reading this site but Gary dives a bit deeper.

He said, “Among other things, search engines use the HTML of your pages to make sense of the content. If for example you break up paragraphs, remove H tags in favor of CSS styling, or add breaking tags (especially true for CJK languages), you change the HTML parsers’ output, which in turn may change the site’s rankings.”

In short, when redesigning, sure – go ahead – make the site pretty. But changing the core HTML can result in ranking changes.

Gary recommends, “try to use semantically similar HTML when you redesign the site and avoid adding tags where you don’t actually need them.”

So if you can change the design but at the same time keep things in the HTML looking similar, that is your best bet. Change a lot without changing a lot – if that makes sense.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

Yandex had a boatload of its source code across all its technology allegedly leaked by a disgruntled employee and part of that was the source code for Russia’s largest search engine – Yandex. As you can imagine, SEOs and others are diving in and seeing what they can learn from the source code.

I personally did not download the source code, so I did not go through it myself but I wanted to share what people did find via Twitter from their investigations of the source code.

Here’s the alpha version of an explorer tool for the leaked #Yandex Search code.

It lets you browse through the ranking factors, view by tags, etc, and start to find connections.

Easy to add new features if there’s anything you want to see!https://t.co/AjbYnrDl9P pic.twitter.com/pQ4scOkP6w

— Rob Ousbey : @[email protected] (@RobOusbey) January 28, 2023

I downloaded the code, analyzed it and there is a lot of useful information for Google SEO as well. pic.twitter.com/RWrgnnlpj6

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

Theoretically, what is the difference between algorithms used in Google and in Yandex?

They are quite similar:
– there is RankBrain analogue – MatrixNet;
– they are using PageRank (almost the same as in Google);
– a lot of text algorithms are the same. pic.twitter.com/Djjl8Bmjwn

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

According to Statcounter Yandex is close to Yahoo and Bing by market share: pic.twitter.com/5GKIvKIvAo

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

Main insights after analysing this list:

#1 Age of links is a ranking factor. pic.twitter.com/U47uWvEq9w

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

#3 Numbers in URLs is bad for rankings pic.twitter.com/ECgwGeGUfb

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

#5 Hard pessimization equal PR=0 pic.twitter.com/RRbhuJyZr1

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

#7 Fun fact – there is a separate ranking factor for uplifting Wikipedia pic.twitter.com/799F8KFpkE

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

#9 Document age and last update both are ranking factors. pic.twitter.com/ay1GTMVEtJ

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

Right now I checked ~40% of the list, there are a lot more (about text relevancy, behaivor factors, page rank, internal links,etc).

Will continue this thread after some time.

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

The first thread got a lot of impressions (500k views for the moment, thanks for you retweets and likes!), so I decided to finalize.https://t.co/UQiQsnpWd2

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#2 Additionnaly: ranking factor for orphan pages.

You can easy find them via Screming Frog or other crawlers. pic.twitter.com/zIPwAelpD0

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#4 Number of search queries of your site/url is a ranking factor.

Obviously more = better. pic.twitter.com/xXQ6FMDghP

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#6 If your url whould be the last for search session (user will find what he needs) – it whould impact rankings.

There are strict factors for this and predictible factors as well. pic.twitter.com/Zx3sBZORCs

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#8 Special ranking factors for short videos (tiktok, shorts, reels) pic.twitter.com/oKPzL09MID

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#10 Keywords in URL is a ranking factors.

As we can see from the description – the optimal would be include up to 3 words from the search query. pic.twitter.com/Q1euKWSiST

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#14 One more ranking factor for content quality – broken embedded video on the page.

Embed videos – good for rankings.
Broken embed videos – bad. pic.twitter.com/2SUys65PHp

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#16 If you backlinks anchors contain all words from the keywords – it’s good for SEO.

If it is in a one link – it’s more beneficial. Especially if the order of words is the same. pic.twitter.com/WrbESJ8Da5

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#18 The quality rank of texts on the domain is a ranking factor.

Pages with low quality content affect the entire domain. pic.twitter.com/MJUCTVB9CH

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#20 Funny, there is a random as a separate ranking factor.

When you don’t understant why some of page is on top – it could be just random (to test behaivor factors). pic.twitter.com/TGtzFrmBOV

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

#22 Backlinks from the top 100 best websites by PageRank impacts on rankings.

That’s not news. pic.twitter.com/ikxldWLJqy

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

Wow, I just found the list with initial weights of Yandex ranking factors.

Do you need one more thread? 😁

P.S. final weights calculated by AI (matrixnet), but initial values are useful as well. pic.twitter.com/WeroYQy7Yu

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023

That said, I’ve been digging into the codebase myself to find things of interest.

I’m doing this live, so I don’t know how long it will take between tweets.

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023

A lot of the code related to Yandex Search lives in the Kernel, ExtSearch, Search, and Robot archives, but again I won’t be able to be comprehensive here until I’ve looked through everything.

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023

Some really interesting things in the web_meta_factors_info/factors_gen.in file as it relates to content features and factors.

For instance, some things that we’d expect like a minimum expectation of the proximity of words in a title to the words in the query. pic.twitter.com/YRsrCpVsqU

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023

Interestingly, there are a lot of scrapers in here Google News, Shopping, YouTube and even other Yandex services.

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023

Hmm…this might be the structure of how Yandex stores documents in their version of a doc server.

Still looking for an idea of how they structure their inverted index. pic.twitter.com/1lwTbOirnx

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023

Here’s a protobuf of link factors. pic.twitter.com/1RM6o1xzRg

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023

In the “link prioritizer code” they talk about decreasing the priority of links with the same text from the same host. In other words, don’t count the links from duplicate content. pic.twitter.com/dQTUnScCUy

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023

How did y’all come up with that number of ranking factors?

I see 481 factors just related to “Rapid Clicks” pic.twitter.com/sw5A3ia3Bk

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 28, 2023

Similar to the Googs, Yandex has multiple ranking models to choose from.

In this select_ranking_models.cpp file, they talk about having different models for different languages and locations. pic.twitter.com/m210tpOUDb

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 28, 2023

I’m gonna go watch TV, but I obviously have to add this to my book so I’m gonna add more over the next couple days

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 28, 2023

Been digging into how this robot archive is structured.

It looks like the Zora directory is where a lot of interesting things are happening. There’s a limits.pb.txt file that stores the requests per second rate for the host and the IP address for 204k hosts. pic.twitter.com/0oulKm58dx

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 28, 2023

Here’s where the Document and Query factors are collected and scored.

Looks like it goes to storage after this tho. pic.twitter.com/qJAiLfSrsU

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 29, 2023

Ok, real quick, top 5 most positively and negatively weighted ranking factors and their coefficients in the initial weighting in Yandex’s document relevance calculation. Negatives first

#1 FI_ADV: -0.2509284637

This factor determines that there is advertising on the site.

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 29, 2023

#3 FI_QURL_STAT_POWER: -0.1943768768

Factor is the number of URL impressions for the request

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 29, 2023

#5 FI_GEO_CITY_URL_REGION_COUNTRY: -0.168645758

Factor is the geographical coincidence of the document and the country that the user searched from.

Ok, now for the top 5 positively weighted factors.

— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 29, 2023

Here is a starting point for link related factors.https://t.co/fwP8TxuOrM

— Christoph C. Cemper 🇺🇦 🧡 SEO (@cemper) January 30, 2023

Will this help you do SEO on Google? Probably not but hey, it is super interesting.

Ah, but once they find the optimal word count …

BOOM

— John Mueller is watching out for Google+ 🐀 (@JohnMu) January 29, 2023

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

On Thursday, January 26th, there were some signs of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update. The signals and chatter I was tracking, honestly, were not at super high levels. However, now that I see Glenn Gabe shared some really shocking charts of sites previously impacted by Google updates but now seeing a big swing. This is not necessarily a product reviews update but rather sites in the product reviews space that are seeing massive swings on the 26th.

Let me first share Glenn’s charts, which he posted on Twitter and said, “Heads-up, run a product reviews site? Google pushed something on 1/26 that, once again, impacted some product review sites HEAVILY. These are sites I’ve documented before with crazy surges/drops, even outside of Product Reviews Updates. Let’s see if this sticks. I hope it does.”

Here is that tweet:

Heads-up, run a product reviews site? Google pushed something on 1/26 that, once again, impacted some product review sites HEAVILY. These are sites I’ve documented before with crazy surges/drops, even outside of Product Reviews Updates. Let’s see if this sticks. I hope it does 🙂 pic.twitter.com/ZXa1r3xwcD

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 29, 2023

Starting on the 25th, I began to see limited chatter kick into gear at WebmasterWorld. The chatter there was not specific to the product reviews update but it could have been related to it. Here are some quotes from there:

My site has been climbing rankings all week and yet today the traffic has been dismal (UK). Do I smell an update?

My ranks, as I said, have been getting better after being in decline steadily since this time last year. I haven’t done anything to improve. Could this mean that google are indeed looking at different ranking signals, not just links? I could have gained a link or two that has turned it around I suppose but no evidence so far.

After great improvement over the month of January, got a big bang down since January 24 onwards. Changes again?

Definitely, something is wrong with Google. My traffic is going down without any reason. Are there any delays with Analytics?

I don’t know what’s going on, but my website has been in free fall for a week now. And it’s the usual picture again, old news articles or meaningless keyword spam ranks in my area on the top places. It’s really no fun anymore …

Google Tracking Tools

Here are what the tracking tool are showing:

Mozcast:

Semrush:

Cognitive SEO:

Advanced Web Rankings:

RankRanger:

Accuranker:

SERPmetrics:

Algoroo:

So the tools are not lighting up but this update may have been something tweaked with the product reviews update, or a new update impacting product review sites or limited to those segments of websites?

Have any of you seen any big changes around January 26th?

Forum discussion at Twitter.