The source code leak of Russia's largest search engine 'Yandex' reveals the determinant of search ranking

Source code leaked from Yandex, Russia's largest search engine and the fourth largest search engine in the world. It is not an attack by a hacker, but a former employee stole the Git repository, and although personal information is not included, the 1922 search ranking determinants used in the algorithm have been clarified. increase.

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 the 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

Massive Yandex code leak reveals Russian search engine's ranking factors | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/massive-yandex-code-leak-reveals-russian-search-engines-ranking-factors/

Alex Braaks, who is familiar with SEO, has analyzed the content and published a file with additional explanations for each item in English. According to the analysis, the number one factor in 1922 was 'page rank', which should have been Google's algorithm.

The file with ranking factors: https://t.co/PuSDFp1ulk

Structure for each factor:
- name
- link to internal wiki (restricted)
- Anti Seo Upper Bound (haha)
- description (it's in Russian, I translated it for you)
-etc

Funny, that the first factor in the list - PageRank.pic.twitter.com/7DbUp2pH34

— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023

In addition to this, the elements that came to the top of the search ranking in Yandex were as follows.

・The page is not too old
- Have a lot of organic traffic
・The number of numbers and slashes contained in the URL is small.
・ The value of 'hard pessimization' is close to 0 (it is a value that indicates whether penalties are imposed due to spam, low-quality content, search guideline violations, black hat SEO, etc. )
- Hosted on a reliable server
・It must be a Wikipedia page or be linked from Wikipedia
・Being linked to or hosted by a top page of a domain
・URL contains keywords (up to 3)

Many former Google employees are employed in Yandex, and it is reported that there are many similarities with Google, such as page rank and many text algorithms. Although it is different from Google, it is said that 70% of the search results are similar, and Mr. Braaks describes the leaked Yandex source code as ``very helpful information for SEO.''

It is also known that the Yandex code used racist terms in function names, variable names, output messages, etc. Among these, it seems that the N word tended to be used to replace 'worker'.

Yandex data breach reveals source code littered with racist language | IT PRO
https://www.itpro.co.uk/security/data-breaches/369966/yandex-data-breach-reveals-source-code-littered-with-racist-language

・Continued
It turned out that Russian search engine Yandex was tampering with search results so that President Putin's photo would not appear even if he searched for 'bald' - GIGAZINE

by Carmen Rodriguez