ex leaks 1,922 search ranking factors
An employee of Yandex allegedly leaked part of a Yandex source-code repository. This contained over 1,900 factors search engines use to rank search results.
Why do we care? This leak revealed 1,922 ranking elements Yandex used in their search algorithm as of July 2022. Martin MacDonald said it best today on Twitter: “The Yandex Hack is probably the most fascinating thing to have occurred in SEO in years.”
Yandex isn’t Google. Yandex is not Google. Yandex may list a ranking factor, but that does not mean Google will give that signal the same weight. Google might not use all 1,922 factors.
However, some ranking factors might be very similar. This document can provide useful insight to help you better understand search engines such as Google from a technological perspective.
The larger picture. Bleeping Computer reported that the code was discovered as a torrent on a popular hacking forum.
The leaker posted a magnet linking to ‘Yandex Git Sources’, which they claim contains 44.7 GB files that were stolen from the company in August 2022. These code repositories are said to contain all the source code of the company, as well as anti-spam rules.
Yandex called it a leak. The code was discovered on a popular hacking forum. It was initially thought that Yandex had been hacked. Yandex denied it and made the following statement:
“Yandex wasn’t hacked. Our security service discovered code fragments in an internal repository that was public. However, the content is different from the Yandex version.
A repository is a tool that allows you to store and work with code. This is how code is used internally in most companies.
Repositories can only be used to code, and they are not meant for personal data storage. While we are currently conducting an internal investigation into why source code fragments were released to the public, we don’t see any threat to platform performance or user data.
Get more information. More coverage can be found on Techmeme.
Yandex ranking factor list. MacDonald has shared the complete list of 1,922 elements at Web Marketing School. It is highly recommended that you download it as Yandex will likely try to remove this information from the web. You can also find a translation on Dropbox.
Alex Buraks has an ongoing Twitter thread that analyzes the ranking factors. Many of the factors you would expect to see are PageRank, text relevance, content age and newness, host reliability, and many other link-related factors (e.g. age, relevancy etc.).
Some surprising ranking factors that SEOs are discovering include the number of unique visitors, organic traffic percentage and average domain rank across queries.
The post Yandex “leak” reveals 1,922 search rank factors was first published on Search Engine Land.