SEARCHENGINES
Yandex Search Ranking Factors Leaked & Exposed
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.
SEARCHENGINES
Google’s Search Liaison Urges Patience As The March 2024 Core Update Continues To Rollout
Google is urging site owners and SEOs to have patience as the Google March 2024 core update continues to roll out over the coming weeks. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said on X to wait for the update to complete before deciding on what changes you may want to make.
He wrote, “I would let the update complete before deciding if there are any fundamental changes you might want to make.” In fact, he said, “There might not be any to do at all,” and maybe whatever ranking declines you are seeing now won’t be there when the update is done rolling out.
As a reminder, the March 2024 core update started officially on March 5th, then we first saw ranking shifts on March 8th and 9th, then some reversals on March 12th and then more movement on March 15th. The update can take a full month to roll out, so it may go into April 2024.
Sullivan then went into what other changes or factors may lead to a site seeing less search visibility and traffic.
Your site seems clean and nice. Going through the site, I see [steak pie] as one of your featured recipes. You’re in the carousel and second in web links for that. That’s a pretty solid sign that we like your content.
If you were previously first, trying to move up from second by doing a lot of technical and content stuff wouldn’t be something I’d recommend. Second is super successful. Rankings can also change for various reasons, so you might move back up.
You might also look to see if there’s any seasonal change. IE: instead of looking at rankings, look at your traffic. If it was higher previously, what for? Perhaps you had some seasonal recipes a few months ago that people are looking for less. We have a page about debugging traffic drops that talks about seasonality here.
Here are those posts within context:
I would let the update complete before deciding if there are any fundamental changes you might want to make. There might not be any to do at all.
Your site seems clean and nice. Going through the site, I see [steak pie] as one of your featured recipes. You’re in the carousel and…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 15, 2024
Please be kind in your responses.
Forum discussion at X.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Core Update Rumbling, Manual Actions FAQs, Core Web Vitals Updates, AI, Bing, Ads & More
For the original iTunes version, click here.
This past weekend (a week ago) we saw the first ranking volatility likely from the Google March 2024 core update. We also some saw possible reversals or recoveries a few days later. Then today, Friday, March 15th, I am seeing more ranking volatility likely related to the core and spam updates. Google posted its official FAQs for pure spam manual actions. Google has clarified its page experience and core web vitals help documentation and how it relates to rankings. Google has replaced FID with INP as a core web vital metric, as expected. Google said sites use AI for some articles but don’t specify which are the lowest quality pages. Google explains that double down on AI content may be a bad idea now. John Mueller’s site dropped out of the Google index this week, no joke. Bing Webmaster Tools may provide up to 24 months of data. Bing Webmaster Tools’s new top SEO insights report can tell you if you have inadequate links. Bingbot now supports Brotli compression. Google Top Stories has this “more context” section written by AI. Google image search is testing like buttons. Google Local panels are testing numerous interface changes. Google local reviews can show photos related to reviews and related photos to photos. Google is testing placing website links next to hotels and restaurants. Google Business Profiles shows services with book now buttons. Google Merchant Center Product Studio released themed templates, with the first being for St. Patrick’s Day. Microsoft Advertising is testing a new advertising console. Microsoft Copilot is now using GPT-4 Turbo. Copilot is now in that Microsoft Advertising console. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
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Search Topics of Discussion:
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SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: March 15, 2024
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
We’re seeing more ranking fluctuations likely related to the Google March core and spam updates. Google Merchant Center Product Studio has new AI generated themed templates, one ready for St. Patrick’s Day. Google Image search is testing thumbs up like buttons. Google tests dishes near me. Google has trending icons in the people also search for section. Plus, I posted the weekly SEO video recap.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
-
Google March 2024 Core & Spam Update Movement Today
Today is day 10 of the Google March 2024 core update rollout and Google March 2024 spam update. We believe we saw the core update touch down on March 8th and 9th and some possible recoveries or fluctuations on March 12th. Now I see more signs of Google search ranking volatility likely related to the core and spam updates today. -
Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Core Update Rumbling, Manual Actions FAQs, Core Web Vitals Updates, AI, Bing, Ads & More
This past weekend (a week ago) we saw the first ranking volatility likely from the Google March 2024 core update. We also some saw possible reversals or recoveries a few days later. Then today, Friday, March 15th, I am seeing more ranking volatility likely related to the core and spam updates. Google posted…. -
Google Merchant Center Product Studio With Themed Templates Including St. Patrick’s Day
Google Merchant Center has added new themed templates to the Product Studio. The new theme was for St. Patrick’s Day, which is coming up this Sunday. But Google will soon add Easter, Spring, and Mother’s Day themed templates to the Product Studio as well. -
Google Image Search Results Testing Like Button
Google seems to be testing a like, thumbs-up, button on image search results. The thumbs-up icon is near the share and save button and below the image, description and visit button. -
Google Search Dishes Nearby Carousel
Have you seen the “dishes nearby” carousel in the mobile Google Search results? I am not 100% sure if it is new, but I don’t think I’ve covered it before. But Google will show dishes served by nearby restaurants in a carousel interface. -
Google People Also Search For Trending Icons
Google is placing trending icons on some of the people also search for people in the knowledge panel. We’ve seen various forms of this and I don’t think this is specifically new, but I don’t think I covered this specific example. -
Wall Of Superstars At Google
Here is a photo from the Google Hong Kong office of a wall that says “Superstars at Google” and it then shows photos, names and descriptions of specific Googlers.
Other Great Search Threads:
- Bing is testing a large font size for the first title on Bing SERP., Shameem Adhikarath on X
- Google, in an effort to display and prioritize even more expertise, is showing a short bio of who the person is who’s writing or tweeting about a “Perspective” Notice how they add “covers technology” This looks very ve, Shalom Goodman on X
- Are these JavaScript Errors Anything to Worry About?, Reddit
- I think this might be new (DMA), for bus and train searches. Don’t recall a “Transport sites” module (like the Places sites one) being mentioned in Google’s announcements…, Lluc B. Penycate on X
- Perplexity’s integration of Yelp data is imperfect but points to exciting times ahead for “Local AI.”, Greg Sterling on X
- Want your mind blown today? -> Ray Kurzweil is Google’s AI visionary and has over *61* years of experience with AI. Yes, 61. On Rogan’s podcast, he covered a number of topics that would blow your mind. To say he knows his stuff AI-wi, Glenn Gabe on X
Search Engine Land Stories:
Other Great Search Stories:
Industry & Business
Links & Content Marketing
Local & Maps
- How Local Businesses Inspire Love, Loyalty, and Friendship, Moz
- Apple Maps Cycling Directions Expand to Austria, Belgium, and Sweden, MacRumors
- Apple Maps vs. Google Maps: Which Is Better?, MacRumors
- Istanbul construction pit mistaken as lake on Google, Apple, Yandex maps, Daily Sabah
Mobile & Voice
SEO
PPC
Other Search
Feedback:
Have feedback on this daily recap; let me know on Twitter @rustybrick or @seroundtable, on Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky and you can follow us on Facebook and on Google News and make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or just contact us the old fashion way.
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