This is revealed by the ranking factors for SEO and Google

An employee of the Russian search engine Yandex has published almost 18,000 ranking factors. SEO experts have been analyzing the code ever since. But what can SEOs learn from the Yandex leak? And: How does this in turn affect Google? An overview.

It is probably one of the most extensive data sets ever, because: The Russian search engine Yandex was the victim of a leak. The company itself does not speak of a hacker attack. According to reports, however, a former employee is said to have published the secret information about the search engine’s ranking factors.

Yandex leak: 18,000 ranking factors published

At first it seemed as if the employee had revealed around 1,900 ranking factors. As SEO expert Dan Taylor wrote in a report by Search engine journal (SEJ) however, reported the total contained 44 gigabytes in size file a total of even 18,000 ranking factors. Included in it: information about Yandex products such as search, maps, mail, metrics, disc and the cloud.

SEOs can learn this from the Yandex leak

As Yandex explained in an official statement, the contents of the leaked archive are an outdated version of the repository. Up to 64 percent of the data is said to be codes that are now unused or outdated.

In addition, the published code fragments would also contain test algorithms that the company only used internally to check its own services. How many of the codes are actually up to date remains unclear for the time being.

The web magazine Search engine country according to SEOs in particular can still learn a lot from the data and ranking factors.

What ranking factors does Yandex use?

True, the published archive does not give a direct indication of the factors and signals used by Google. However, there is likely to be some overlap, which in turn could result in a technical understanding of search engine processes. And these insights should be beneficial for SEOs.

Yandex divides ranking factors into three categories

Immediately after the Yandex leak, various SEO experts started analyzing the published file. In doing so, they came to some conclusions. For example, the Russian search engine seems to divide its ranking factors into three categories:

• Static Factorsthat are directly related to the site, such as inbound backlinks, internal links, headers, and ad ratios.
• Dynamic Factorsrelated to both the site and the search query, such as Text Relevance, Keyword Inclusion, and TF*IDF
• user factorsrelated to querying users, such as where users are located, query language, and intent modification

Days of the week and time of day affect the ranking

The SEO expert Malte Landwehr has also dealt with the file. in one LinkedIn post he reports that he was able to classify 40 percent of the ranking factors. With this he was able to identify the most relevant categories:

• User Signals
• Left
• Relevance of the text content
• quality and trust

“YMYL is real”

In addition, he confirms that YMYL actually used to optimize websites. There would be 15 ranking factors for medical, financial and legal issues.

He also cites factors specific to HTTPS, authorship, translated content detection, page speed, and user ratings and comments.

In addition, he particularly emphasizes that there are also ten factors for time of day and days of the week. “These ranking fluctuations over the weekend are not imaginary – they are real!” Landwehr said.

Ranking factors: Yandex uses certain special rules

The SEO expert reports that the Russian search engine uses certain special rules. Links and mentions from Wikipedia would therefore be given additional weight.

Some websites, such as the Russian Facebook equivalent VKontakte or TikTok, also have a special ranking factor. Also, there would be some factors for using Yandex Metrika, Google Analytics and JavaScript from Facebook.

Since the leaked file is enormous and contains a lot of data, the experts are not finished with the analysis. So it’s likely that there will be even more insights in the coming weeks.

Yandex leak not the first incident

Yandex is one of the largest search engines in the world and is the eighth most clicked website in the world. While the company is primarily present in Russia, it also has a presence in Turkey, Kazakhstan and Georgia.

Even if the personal data of users is not affected by the leak, the published code itself poses a security risk for Yandex. Hackers could use the leaked information to try to find security gaps and use them for their own purposes.

The incident is the company’s second leak in less than ten years. Back in 2015, a former employee tried to sell the search engine’s code on the black market for around $30,000.

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