If you do SEO, prepare for your biggest “eureka” moment yet…
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— Dmitry Balakov (@dbalakov) January 25, 2023
Yandex—the fourth largest search engine by market share—had its entire source code posted online, along with a list of all 1,922 search ranking factors.
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] pic.twitter.com/6x82AAmbON
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
Welcome to anatomy class
The extensive list contains tons of valuable information on how Yandex ranks content. Factors include:
- Age of links.
- Traffic, plus the percentage of organic traffic.
- Numbers. Apparently using them in your URLs can devalue your rankings.
- Slashes. Also bad for rankings.
- Plenty of factors related to user experience, like CTR, last-click, bounce rate, etc.
… And many, many others. If you’re techy enough, you can read the full list here.
So, how does this help my Google rankings?
While they have their differences, Google and Yandex share many things in common, like using PageRank. Many of the text algorithms are the same, too.
And that’s not even all of it.
Yandex is being built as a “Google clone,” and lots of former Google employees work there—which explains why both platforms have about a 70% match when it comes to search results.
Why we care
If you’re in SEO, studying these ranking factors could help you apply insights from the list to your own content.
And because a lot of the source code is similar to Google’s search algorithm, you may find factors that will help you climb search results. Worth a shot.