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Speaker 1 (00:00)
On January 25, the complete source code for russia’s search engine yandex was leaked online. Many are calling it the most interesting thing to have happened in SEO in years. In this video, I’m going to break down everything there is to know about this leak, the shocking ranking factors that were revealed to us, and how you can use it to your advantage to get more traffic on google. The document you’re seeing here is a full list of 1922 ranking factors in the yandex search engine. Show you where you can download it for yourself soon.
Speaker 1 (00:27)
Why is this so important? Although yandex isn’t google, we can still learn a lot about google by studying the source code release more than ever before. According to alex burrax, who will learn more about later, yandex is chock full of ex googlers. They built it as a google clone, and the same SEO tactics that work for yandex work for google. If you compare google versus yandex results, they’re about a 70% match.
Speaker 1 (00:48)
In addition, yandex has a rank brain equivalent machine learning algorithm called matrixnet. And the first damn ranking factor in the leaked document is, lo and behold, page rank, the same algorithm that made google google. That said, take all of this with a grain of salt. Google and yandex both have machine learning driving their results. So there’s more to these 1922 ranking factors.
Speaker 1 (01:08)
That said, this is the best insight we’ve ever seen into how these algorithms work. Now, before I dig into the highlights of this rank ranking factor document, here’s how you download it for yourself. As it stands right now, there’s a few different dropbox links where you can download this file. I’ve left a link to one in the description. Bear in mind, this seems like something yandex is losing their over and trying to clean up.
Speaker 1 (01:27)
So I wouldn’t be surprised if this link doesn’t last forever. Now, how do you determine what you’re reading? Let’s look at ranking factor number 135. The name of this factor is denoted by the CPP name fi is wiki. The description of it is in russian.
Speaker 1 (01:39)
But with a quick trip over to google translate, we can see that it means this page is from wikipedia.org. Oh, so yeah, wikipedia gets a ranking bonus. Good for you, wikipedia. I also found this cool yandex search ranking factor explorer, which already has translated the descriptions into english. You can enter a word like social and can see the three ranking factors related to having a verified social network account, traffic from social networks and social network players.
Speaker 1 (02:03)
Also, I’d like to give a big shout out to alex burkoff, whose epic tweet thread I’ll draw upon a lot for the key points in this video, as well as michael king with his giga tweet on the yandex situation as well. There’s a lot to discuss, so here’s how I’m going to break things down. We’ll start with the ranking factor highlights that have to do with traffic. Then we’ll get into user behavior and how that relates to search performance, then your best friend backlinks. After that, we’ll get onto onsite optimization, technical SEO, and some miscellaneous what factors that don’t make sense at all.
Speaker 1 (02:30)
But first, let’s look at some greatest hits. Michael King looked at the weighting of the ranking factors from worst negative ranking factors to the best positive ranking factors. Let’s look at some of the highlights, starting with the worst of the worst. Fi eightyv has the highest negative ranking weight, and it has to do with how much advertising you have on your page. If you have a page layout like this, not only will it make your viewers throw up in their mouths, but the search engine will too.
Speaker 1 (02:52)
Fi data age is a negative ranking factor if your article is over than ten years old or if its age can’t be determined. So get date metadata in your content fi. comms links SEO host is a negative ranking factor when you have more than 50% commercial anchor text, make sure to watch my video on anchor text distribution. After you finish here, link in the description now onto some of the most positive ranking factors. Fi is.com gives a ranking boost to domains.
Speaker 1 (03:15)
I guess that settles that debate. Fiqueerry downer clicks combo is a combination of click through rate and something known as frc. We’ll explore this later. And this last one, url domain Fraction, gives a ton of ranking love to the presence of the keyword in the domain name. Let’s take a deeper dive into the category of traffic, which I find super interesting because many seos don’t think about traffic as a major ranking factors.
Speaker 1 (03:36)
Alex Brooks translations revealed some interesting findings. This one basically means the more traffic you have, the more ranking power your site has. That’s super clear. That’s why you should always target easy keywords first. Get their small traffic before moving on to more challenging keywords.
Speaker 1 (03:50)
And check this out. Ranking factor beast host means pause cool name. It means that the average position your site has words keywords is a ranking factor. Don’t try to go for keywords that are out of your league. You’ll rank poorly for them, which will hurt your overall site’s ability to rank.
Speaker 1 (04:04)
The next one is a trip. If the percentage of traffic you get from search engines is too high, that can be viewed as a negative ranking factor. You actually don’t want to have 100% Google traffic. If your website is getting social media traffic or you’re buying ads, that’s a good thing. Both of these situations show that a real business is being run, not just a spammy SEO project.
Speaker 1 (04:24)
This is further confirmed with ranking factored 10 87, which gives you a boost when you have a higher percentage of direct visits. When people type in dignity and marketing.com and go directly to my site, that means they’re returned visitors and fans of my content. It’s also confirmed with ranking factor 1367 that award sites with a healthy percentage of traffic from social networks. After all it’s talked about on social media, there must be something noteworthy about the site. That’s why I always put an emphasis on having a social media presence on my project.
Speaker 1 (04:52)
Now let’s get into user behavior. Ranking Factors the first one is super important, as I’ve been talking about a lot recently on this channel, google wants your content to end the user search journey. That’s why when you hit back on your browser, you’re sometimes asked, how easy was it to find what you wanted on this site? yanx feels the same. You get rewarded when they can determine that your content was the last destination in a chain of hops.
Speaker 1 (05:15)
So do what you can to answer the search query fast and clear in your content. We touched upon this before, but when visitors return to your site specifically within the same month, that’s a positive ranking factor. One of my favorite ways to get visitors back to my site is with an email list and email marketing. Every time you publish new content, send an email to your list to get your fans back to your site and reading your content. I have a special bonus module on email marketing in the affiliate lab, so make sure to check it out.
Speaker 1 (05:39)
Next, just look at how many of these ranking factors have ctr. Click through Rate in the name, make your titles interesting, and clickable from the search results. Now we get to everyone’s favorite SEO subject, and that’s backlinks. Ranking factors 84 and 85 give weight to the percentage of good links you have versus the percentage of bad links you have. Unfortunately, they don’t define good links versus bad links.
Speaker 1 (05:59)
But if you ask me, victor links from quality websites with traffic and never sleep on methods like digital PR link building, which I’ll get to in an upcoming video. So make sure to subscribe. Another way to define good links is to get them from the top 100 best websites ordered by page rank. Or at least get links from sites that they’re linking to. linkage is also a ranking factor.
Speaker 1 (06:17)
That’s why you should always add link building to your SEO plan from day one. Also, don’t worry about getting multiple links from a website you’ve already got a link from. They get discounted. Alex found another interesting one as well. backlink anchors contain all the words of the query.
Speaker 1 (06:30)
How I interpret this is if you’re trying to rank for Best Cat shaver and you have one link with the anchor Best products and another link with the anchor Cat shavers, between the two of them, you have the full keyword. Nice. Then we have verified social accounts as a ranking factor, so maybe there’s an actual benefit for Twitter Blue. Now, outside of showing off, let’s move on to onsite optimization. The most extensive of these ranking factor categories rank atras if you have poor quality content on your site, that will actually bring down the rank ability of the high quality content on your site.
Speaker 1 (06:59)
So go back to that crap you wrote five years ago and give it a content refresh. The Google Helpful Content Update Guidelines say the same thing any content, not just unhelpful content, on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in search. Next, we have some damn specific ranking factors related to urls. Don’t have digits in your urls? Don’t have too many slashes in your urls.
Speaker 1 (07:22)
Too much directory hierarchy is a bad thing. And thank you, Captain Obvious. Put keywords in your urls. We also have Word count, which seems to be important. And as Alex pointed out, the age of your content as well as the last update date are important as well.
Speaker 1 (07:35)
So write content sooner rather than later and update it frequently. Make sure to link your main pages, like your homepage and your pillar Hub pages, to any other important content you want to rank embed maps on your page if relevant. For example, a travel website reviewing a hotel would be wise to embed a map. Or for my sites, I’ll put map embeds on my Contact and about pages. And for the love of all that is holy, make sure your website doesn’t have any broken video embeds.
Speaker 1 (07:58)
There’s plenty of wordpress plugins that will scan your site for these. Next, let’s get techy with it, with some technical SEO ranking factors reduce the number of 400 client errors and 500 server errors on your site. The search engines will think you’re a bump. Reduce the crawl depth for any page you care about. Ranking in general, no important page should be more than two clicks away from the home page.
Speaker 1 (08:17)
And if you leave a page orphaned from internal links completely, you might as well leave it for dead. Now, let’s get into some miscellaneous what fuck ranking factors? Got any traffic from Wikipedia? That’s a ranking factor, believe it or not. Do people bookmark your website?
Speaker 1 (08:29)
That’s a ranking factor too. In case you don’t know how to do that, head over to Dignitymarking.com, click the star next to the search bar on Google Chrome, and you’re all set. And here’s a you not random factor for commercial websites. So if you’re an affiliate marketer like me and can understand, why is this website ranking over me, blame the search engine rng. As we discussed before, Yandex is not Google, and it’s been further pointed out that 244 of these ranking factors have been removed and 988 have been depreciated or upgraded upon.
Speaker 1 (08:59)
But the point is, we can still learn more from this leak that has ever been revealed before. Thanks for watching. Make sure to subscribe for more videos just like this one.