Rank Fast with these Topical Authority Tactics Ep.589
In this podcast episode featuring SEO Specialist Matthew Bertram, the focus is on demystifying Topical Authority in SEO and providing actionable…
Link Building
Yandex Data Leak: The Ranking Factors & The Myths We Found Ep. 563
The 44-gigabyte Yandex source code leak revealed approximately 17,800 ranking factors, confirming that link authority, crawl depth, click-through rate, and user behavior manipulation all influence search rankings.
Key takeaways
- High-authority backlinks impact Yandex rankings, while links from low-authority sites appear to have no effect.
- Pages reachable in fewer clicks from the home page are treated as more important by Yandex's active code.
- Yandex's PF filter actively detects and penalizes fake click traffic by monitoring IP similarities and on-page user actions.
- Time of day is a confirmed Yandex ranking factor, likely tied to user location and query intent.
- Meta keywords are still used by Yandex, even though Google ignores them and Bing treats them as spam.
The machine learning technology is so good right now that you just really shouldn't try to game the system.
About this episode
Yandex Data Leak: The Ranking Factors & The Myths We Found. An in-depth look at the Yandex ranking factors leak, algorithm updates, and related announcements from Dan Taylor, our Russian SEO expert.
Questions this episode answers
Does crawl depth affect search rankings according to the Yandex leak?
Yes. Yandex has active code indicating that URLs reachable from the home page in fewer clicks carry higher importance. This contrasts with Google, which has publicly stated crawl depth is not explicitly a ranking factor, though John Mueller noted in 2018 that Google gives more weight to pages closer to the home page.
How does Yandex detect and penalize fake click traffic?
Yandex uses a filter called the PF filter that monitors IP similarities and tracks user actions after a click. If traffic looks unnatural, Yandex penalizes the site's ranking. In 2020, the head of Yandex webmaster tools confirmed the company was making good progress detecting and penalizing this behavior.
Are meta keywords still a ranking factor anywhere?
According to the Yandex leak, Yandex still uses meta keywords as a ranking signal. Google has stated they do not matter, and Bing has treated them as a spam signal, making it difficult to optimize for all three search engines at once using this element.
In their words
The current leak revealed 1,922 ranking factors, of which more than 64% were listed as unused or deprecated.
Host
If you have a page that's one click away from the home page versus pages that are multiple clicks away from the home page, what would you assume is more important?
Host
Terms defined in this episode
- TF-IDF (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency)
- A ranking signal that measures how frequently a term appears on a page relative to how many documents across the site or web contain that term, giving a ratio of relevance.
- PF Filter
- A Yandex algorithm filter believed to stand for page fraud that actively detects and penalizes websites engaging in click manipulation and fake user behavior.
- MatrixNet
- A Yandex machine learning ranking system announced in 2009 and superseded in 2017 by a system called Catboots.
- Click Jacking
- A known SEO violation within Yandex where artificial clicks are generated to manipulate click-through rate rankings, detected by monitoring IP similarities and user actions on the page.
Full transcript is being added.
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint
Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG™ (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.
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