Cancel the consideration of links in the ranking of commercial queries. Yandex canceled link ranking

The day before, Yandex once again officially admitted that it had long ago returned link ranking, which was disabled in 2014 for a number of topics in the Moscow region. This time confirmation came from Ekaterina Gladkikh as part of a speech at the Yandex Webmaster School.

According to Ekaterina, disabling link ranking for commercial inquiries in a number of topics for the Moscow region, Yandex hoped to influence SEO specialists. However desired result Yandex did not succeed, and the link ranking was returned.

Let us remind you that in May of this year I myself reported this Alexander Sadovsky in his interview with a Western publication:

“...As we continue to work on this problem, we decided that it would be logical to return links to the ranks of ranking factors for commercial queries.”

Our internal research has proven that links for Moscow work, and we regularly shared with your clients with this information. Since the spring of 2014, the issuance has been significantly shaken, but there have been virtually no serious qualitative changes. For example, the positions of sites promoted in the Rookee service (region “Moscow” and related to topics “with linkless ranking”) practically did not change during the “linkless” period and look as follows:

Our subsequent studies also confirmed the operation of links in the Moscow region. Many SEO specialists have come to similar conclusions. For example, in February 2015, at the AllinTop conference, experts also said that Yandex still did not disable the influence of the link factor on ranking in commercial topics in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

And just recently, at an SEO conference in Kazan, Igor Bakalov(bakalov.info) stated that it is obvious that Yandex is “fucking the brains” of optimizers. According to Igor, instead of actually disabling the link, the possibility of finding documents with zero text relevance using link anchors was eliminated. At the same time, for all other documents, the anchor account remained accounted for.

Minusinsk and Yandex reference classifier

In her speech, Ekaterina also noted that Yandex has 105 factors. Based on the totality of these characteristics, Matrixnet determines whether the link is good (G - good) or bad (B - bad). Those. Yandex algorithmically does not divide links into natural and SEO links. The completeness of this Yandex classifier is 99%, accuracy is 94%.

According to Yandex, using the classifier, the search engine can distinguish between rental and permanent links and set their number for each site. In this regard, Yandex’s opinion regarding perpetual links is as follows:

Note that according to the same source, Minusinsk is now updated 2 times a month, due to sanctions of this algorithm You can get out in 2-4 months. This is confirmed by our cases, which we shared with SEOnews readers.

How to promote in the current conditions

Taking into account the latest statements by Yandex (on behalf of Ekaterina Gladkikh), our vision of the situation is as follows:

It is imperative to attract natural links - interesting and relevant content, convenient site structure, etc. As for purchasing links, this process needs to be approached correctly, moving from quantity to quality. The slide from the Yandex presentation once again demonstrates this:

Speaking in simple language- less is better. Buy links selectively, from quality sites. And don’t forget that links are only one of the Yandex ranking factors, therefore, along with the site’s link mass, it is necessary to develop other components of the site: content, usability, behavioral factors, social signals, etc.

Today, the Rookee service offers all the necessary tools and services for working with the main Yandex ranking factors:

For integrated approach to promotion: SEO-Booster services, Low frequency promotion, usability audit, Behavioral factors.

Hello my readers! On March 12, 2014, news spread around the Internet world: , head of the search engine Yandex service Alexander Sadovsky announced it on International practical conference“Bynet Week. Awakening" in Minsk . In particular, the cancellation of external links will affect certain commercial sections in Moscow and the Moscow region, these are:

• Legal services
• Tourism and rest
• Website development and promotion
• Electronics and household appliances
• Real estate
• beauty and health
• Clothes and accessories

The rest of the topics (finance, insurance, furniture, windows, cars and motorcycles, and all the rest...) will be as before according to the old ranking with links.

In the future, this will affect other regions of Russia, everything will happen gradually, but we started with Moscow, since this is where the largest commercial market is and a lot of money is being made. This situation has been brewing for a long time, since many web masters promoted their sites to the top only for money (buying links), without paying due attention to usability, behavioral factors, and other work on their site, they simply bought everything for money, which led to spam with links, low-quality sites (shit sites) that were in the top search results. I am very glad that this happened, now web masters will start working on the quality of the site and the top will be truly excellent sites created for people, and not God knows what.

Will come new era search engine optimization (SEO) market, where there will be Special attention be given human factors. I think that in this new search engine optimization algorithm the following promotion methods will play a major role:

1. Social networks (factors) - more attention will be paid to promotion through social networks.
2. Content quality - robots will begin to study your unique content (articles) more deeply, conduct semantic analysis text and check it for high uniqueness, so that it’s not in vain that you are put in the top.
3. Behavioral factors - more attention will be paid to how people behave on your site, how deep page views and bounce rates are, time spent on the site.
4. The naturalness of links - and, of course, checking the links from where they came to your site and their, so to speak, humanity, and not purchase and artificiality, that is, when people themselves wanted to leave a link to your site because they liked it.
5. Website appearance - quality appearance, template, ease of navigation, menu.

What Yandex cancels link ranking, I myself found out by chance through rumors, and then I watched a speech by Alexander Sadovsky, where in a couple of clicks on the button the ranking of links was disabled:

So, start working hard on the site and your articles, now the competition for ranking in the top will increase, it will also be hard for many link exchanges (sape, gogetlinks, etc.) that have gotten rich by selling links, now let them tighten their belts and earn their living with water they go to the gruel. Finally, Yandex took strict measures, I am very pleased. Already about an hour after the cancellation of link ranking, everything immediately changed in the top, many shitty sites fell out, now I’m looking forward to it coming to other regions faster ranking without links.

And it was like, the crook buys links, the site is moved to the top in order to sell their products, which are mostly fake and Low quality, like the essence of these web masters, there is nothing to say about uniqueness, relevance to queries, usability. ALL, BASTA!!!

Let's discuss this news in the comments!? I would especially like to hear the opinions of professionals in this matter, and just people who understand this..

Greetings, readers of my blog site. Today's post informational nature and is dedicated to the promotion of Internet resources against the background information war between link exchanges and Yandex. On various SEO forums you can read a bunch of depressing messages about what happened cancellation link ranking Yandex. For many, this news came as a real shock, because purchasing links becomes a pointless waste of money. People who for a long time successfully promoted their web projects with links, they simply don’t know what to do next. Will the wave of link leveling affect them? What to do with previously purchased links? These questions haunt them. Let's try to figure out whether the current situation is so bad, and how to now promote resources for Yandex.

So, at the beginning of December 2013, Yandex specialists announced that from 2014 the link factor will almost completely disappear from search algorithms issuance formation. Naturally, this statement spread among webmasters at the speed of light and created a sensation. How can you cancel link ranking if SEO mainly depends on it?! What to do next? Most site owners were stupefied. Some believed that this was the beginning of a cold war between Yandex and the largest link exchanges.

But here it is important to understand the nuances of this statement, because, as we know, the devil is in the details. According to Sadovsky (head of the Yandex web search department), link factors will be gradually disabled in different topics. The Moscow region will take the first blow. Thus, Yandex decided to test new algorithms in Moscow so as not to violate overall quality issuance. At the same time, in fact, Sadovsky’s statement pursued the only goal - to become a viral bomb that would make optimizers forget about links and remember about Direct (which, by the way, brings the main income to Yandex)! Many did just that.

Six months have passed since the introduction of this algorithm, but practically nothing has changed in the search results! In general, the construction of search results is influenced by four large groups of factors (behavioral, internal, social and). Note that the reference group has long lost its former significance, especially in competitive topics. Many optimizers, acting on only one group of factors, pull their requests to the first positions in weakly competitive topics. Since it is easiest to influence the reference group, we stopped there. Other webmasters influenced internal factors and received the TOP, again for low-competitive queries. But highly competitive keys, even last year, could not be promoted without the combination of all four groups of formation factors. These facts make us all first of all think about maintaining. After all, who knows what’s in Yandex’s head.

Why does Yandex cancel link ranking? First of all, to create panic and attract (and without special material costs) more Direct users. This will also lead to a redistribution of the SEO market between link exchanges and behavioral promotion, and there will be more of the latter. However, high-quality Trust links that are not spammed will still work! This concludes the publication and suggests watching a video on this topic. And also mine, which occupy top positions in Yandex for various key queries.

On December 5, the head of the Yandex web search department, Alexander Sadovsky, announced that from 2014 the search engine will no longer take into account links as a ranking factor. The quality of search, he said, will remain the same. Russian market search engine optimization (SEO), which is worth half a billion dollars, saw the announcement as the beginning of the apocalypse.

To find something on the Internet, search service It is not enough to know the contents of hundreds of millions of websites. The main thing is to correctly sort (rank) what you find. A person formulates his request in two or three words. The service must not only understand the request, but also select from a variety of suitable pages the most useful.

Who referred to whom?

The higher the authority (weight) of a page for a search query, the higher it will be shown in search results. IN Russian Internet more than 60 million users: high weight for an important request guarantees an influx of visitors to the site.

Naturally, site owners try to adapt resources to the requirements of search engines - it is always better if your web page is easy to find. This process is called search engine optimization, and it comes in two types: “white” and “black”. In the first case, the site is brought into compliance with the recommendations of search engine developers. In the second, everyone tries to increase weight accessible ways, including prohibited techniques.

Such techniques include trading links. It is traditionally believed that a link to a site increases the authority of this site in the eyes of search engine. But, let’s say, it’s difficult for a newly opened online store to get a link from a good site that is trusted search robot. Therefore, they buy links, essentially creating false authority for themselves.

Yandex does not like participants in this market, but until now there has been no talk of destroying the link factor, although the influence of links on the overall weight of sites, according to the observations of site owners, has long been declining. If, as a result of the attack on optimization, the quality of the search does not really drop, then users will only benefit - the success of their attempt to “buy a car radio” will not depend on whether the store bought links to itself.

Illustration: Yandex

The current apocalypse promises to be local and will affect only Moscow commercial requests - that is, requests that involve the purchase or sale of goods and services. And yet it is difficult to resist extrapolating the message about the Yandex experiment to all types of requests.

Back in the day, links were truly the primary ranking factor in search results. At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, the Network was most easily imagined as static documents linking to each other. Calculation of the so-called citation index (whether it is Yandex CI or Google PageRank) is fundamentally similar to the calculation of similar indices for authors of scientific articles: the number of times you have been cited, the number of times you have done well. Modern Network- is no longer a bunch of documents, and links for it are not a natural ranking factor. For news readers, it is not referenceability that is important, but efficiency; for buyers of goods in online stores - reviews from other buyers. For mobile users more important are sites with mobile version. For video lovers - a search results consisting of videos.

In these conditions, modern search engines have long been reducing the importance of link ranking. After all, it is not always important who refers to whom. What is more important is how much the information in the results matches the request, that is, whether it meets the user’s expectations. An employee of the Moscow Zoo is unlikely to search Yandex for the same jaguar as a car dealership manager. So the search engine takes into account hundreds of signals from sites and users when ranking.

Multivariate analysis

The questions that users ask about online services are constantly becoming more complex. The structure of the Internet itself is changing, and following it, the mechanisms for ranking results are being improved. Of the eight hundred Yandex ranking factors, only 70 are linked. There is an unofficial list of 200 Google ranking factors floating around on the Internet - it clearly shows how small a share links take in the overall picture.

The position of a site in search results depends on the name of the domain, its history, and even on who registered it. It is also important how often they appear in the text keywords whether the content is structured, whether the page contains multimedia content, and whether the text is easy to read. Moreover, low-quality texts lead to a decrease in the page’s weight in search results. It's no surprise that content optimization is a huge part of the SEO market.

Illustration: Yandex

No less important are the architecture of the site, its loading speed, the number of pages, the absence of failures, and the presence of correct navigation.

A separate big topic is user interaction. Google is said to take user behavior into account Chrome browser, time spent on the site, the number of tweets about the page and, of course, the number of likes and Google pluses. According to rumors, even mentions of the brand in news texts are taken into account.

Business only

Market participants developing their own businesses on the Internet are dissatisfied with Yandex’s decision to abandon link ranking in commercial queries. They believe that Yandex forces them to promote sites exclusively through own services- system contextual advertising"Yandex.Direct" and the aggregator of online stores "Yandex.Market".

Indeed, Yandex actively restructured its relationships with businesses in 2013. He is gradually introducing the “Islands” platform, which will allow you to sell goods and services without visiting the website; announced the Atom platform, which helps sites personalize their offers. Introduced a new model for placing product offerings on Yandex.Market. Finally, Yandex.Money has launched payment processing, thanks to which money from bank cards, accounts mobile phones and payment terminals for services. All these are big key decisions and product launches.

It is unlikely that Yandex, ranking commercial requests in a new way, does this for tactical reasons or greed. A company positioning itself as a mirror of the Internet demonstrates very simple thing: The network has irreversibly changed - in it an extra like is worth more than the palisade of links at the bottom of the page. Meaning is valued more than formal compliance with rules. Personal needs of the user - more expensive than services optimizer.

Postscript for optimizers. Sadovsky's statement once again confirmed that the Network is developing precisely in this direction. Another thing is that site owners will continue to use link logic for a long time. At the dawn of the Runet, webmasters exchanged 88x31 button banners without much meaning or purpose. And if linkless rankings are still a long way off, we all have time to buy plastic windows , buy an air conditioner, order pizza and organize inexpensive flower delivery.

Website promotion against the backdrop of an active information war between Yandex and link exchanges is becoming an incredibly hot topic. Various forums related to promotion in one way or another are filled to the brim with depressing messages about the cancellation of the link, about the pointlessness of further promotion; many Top Starters do not see the point in buying links on popular exchanges. People who have successfully promoted their resources for a long time do not know what to expect tomorrow - will the impending wave of link leveling affect them and what to do with already purchased links? — continue to pay for them every day and simply throw money into the air, or abandon links and get filtered by merciless search algorithms?!

In fact, the situation in the modern Russian SEO market is no less acute than around Crimea, and the most interesting thing is that both of these events occur within the same time frame. But let’s try to understand in more detail whether everything is really so bad and we’ll figure it out how to still promote sites under Yandex in modern conditions.

What is really happening or a viral marketing master class from Yandex We will try to understand the current situation in as much detail as possible. So, December 5, 2013 Yandex publicly declares that at the beginning of 2014, the link factor, as such, will completely disappear from the search engine search algorithms. In itself, the statement is so provocative and revolutionary in nature that it spreads at the speed of light, producing the effect of an exploding atomic bomb. How can you cancel the link factor if all SEO rests primarily on it?! How to further promote sites and what to do with already purchased links? The worldview of the vast majority of site owners is being turned upside down... Personally, I had the feeling that this was a new round of the Cold War, only this time Yandex and the largest link exchanges

, But first things first. The first step is to take a more thorough look at the information we have and understand how we should actually perceive this sensational cancellation of the reference. According to Sadovsky (this is the guy who heads the Yandex web search department), link factors will be disabled step by step in various topics and the Moscow region will be the first test subject. That is, Moscow is a kind of test site where Yandex will test its new algorithms and check whether the overall quality of the search results will suffer. The question arises - why Moscow and not some Uryupinsk , where in case of an error, the consequences will be minimally critical for reputation search engine ... Here it is necessary to give certain clarifications. In fact, the December statement was intended to become a kind of viral bomb that would force our brother to seriously think about the advisability of SEO promotion and... remember such a wonderful thing as Direct! almost nothing! I'll tell you terrible secret— all factors influencing the structure of search results can be divided into 4 large groups, and the link group has ALREADY BEEN the least significant, especially in competitive topics. But here it is worth noting one very important point- even by influencing just one group of factors, you can pull a request to the first places in not very competitive topics, which is what many did - they influenced the reference group. Some webmasters influenced only the internal group of factors and were no less successful in bringing not very competitive queries to the TOP, but even in 2013 it was impossible to bring the most competitive queries to the TOP 10 without including all 4 groups of SERP formation factors. And what do we have now? It would seem that we only have 3 strings left in our hands, by pulling which we can achieve the desired results, but even here the situation is ambiguous...

When talking about canceling a link, Yandex is actually hiding the truth between the lines. Why does he need this and what will all this lead to? To the question why, the answer is simple - to create panic and redistribute the wound against the background of which it is possible without making special efforts material resources to replenish the already large fraternity of Direct users. What will this lead to - as mentioned above - to the redivision of the SEO market between old school link promotion exchanges, such as the giant Sape, and the new trend in optimization fashion - behavioral promotion exchanges, with a clear advantage in favor of the latter, and of course Direct, which will pick up those who could not understand what was really happening. When thinking about effective strategies for further website promotion, the first step is to understand what a high-quality link is, how to create it and why it will continue to work.

How to create a high-quality link that Yandex will take into account

It's no secret that Yandex has long learned to detect SEO links and do not take them into account when ranking sites. Agree, everyone knows about this, but then I’ll ask a completely fair question - where did the panic around the statement about the cancellation of the reference come from in this case? It turns out that either site owners and optimizers believe that they buy ONLY high-quality links, or maybe the Russian way works - I’ll buy 10 links and one of them will be good. But now, no matter how much you buy links, there will be no effect from them.

Let's try to imagine what a really good link should look like:

1. This context link completely relevant to the topic of the article
2. This is a link from the article, in full corresponding to the topic of the site, or a link from an article on any topic posted on a news site
3. This the only one external reference from the page
4. This qualitative, visited donor
5. This link is the top link pyramid(I’ll tell you more about this in one of the next articles)
6. This is a link with anchors that fully match canons of the Russian language
7. This is the link that appears simultaneously with a carrier article
8. This is the link where there are transitions

Particular attention should be paid to point No. 8 - it is this that opens a logical loophole for Yandex, allowing you to openly declare the total abolition of link factors by simply transferring them to the social signals section. I advise you to re-read the last sentence again and you will understand what the point is... To put it simply, a link without clicks on it will be considered an SEO link and will not be taken into account, and a link through which Yandex sees clicks will work perfectly, but here we can say that it is not the link itself that is taken into account, but the transitions themselves. In practice, practically nothing has changed, if you had previously built a diverse and high-quality link profile for the site you were promoting or used, and if all you did was buy rental links or use automated systems promotion, then you really will have to reconsider the policy regarding promotion in Yandex. Next, we will look in more detail at each of the 4 factors and I will talk about how to promote websites in modern conditions.

4 factors influencing the formation of search results

So, all methods of influencing search results can be divided into 4 large groups:

1. Internal factors
2. Behavioral factors
3. Social signals
4. Reference factors

The most important thing for Yandex PS is ingroup factors, least important - reference group, in general, as in the above list, from most to least important. Being an extremely request-dependent machine, Yandex will never allow a mediocre site to reach the TOP in a competitive topic, so before promoting, you should first decide on the following: Is it possible for a promoted site to be in the TOP for the selected query?. This can be done in 2 ways:

• analyze the TOP 10 for the desired query and check your site for compliance (age, number of pages in the index, TIC, mentions, etc.)
• easier way - check the current position of the site for the phrase of interest- if this is the TOP 20, then the site will be able to occupy the TOP 10 (I will tell you why this is so in one of the following articles), but if the site is not included in the TOP 20, then you will have to analyze the results, as described in the previous paragraph

If we have decided that we can generate a request for the position we need, we can proceed directly to promotion.

Internal factors

This group of factors is the most important. And here it should be understood that influencing it is the least costly from a material point of view, but the most costly from a time point of view. Learn more about how to properly use internal website resources:

1. Technical optimization. This, one might say, is the basis of the basics. On at this stage we check the site for common technical errors and we try to make it as suitable for promotion as possible. It is important to check such parameters as gluing of mirrors, the presence and correctness of technical robots files and sitemap, correct handling of 404 errors, presence of broken links, etc. In more detail I
2. Promoted page optimization. Everything here should be the same as that of competitors who have already taken the TOP 10 for the request we need. The volume of text, the volume of the promoted word and other page parameters should correspond to the average value of sites that have already ranked TOP. It should be noted here that nausea indicators for different phrases can vary dramatically - For some topics, outright spam is required, while for others, Yandex categorically does not accept it.
3. Internal linking upon request. Here you should use the most relevant pages on your site. To do this, you need to select advanced settings in Yandex search and set the option to search inside the site, enter your site as the site. Yandex will kindly give us results sorted by decreasing relevance. From the first ten pages you should definitely link to the one being promoted with a diluted entry of the required keyword
4. Publishing relevant articles and linking from them. It is worth noting that Yandex ranks sites devoted to one specific topic very well. And what more documents one resource relevant to the request, the better. To do this, you should regularly publish articles on the site that are optimized for the promoted query and link from them to the entry point.
5. Cross-links have long proven themselves to be an effective tool for improving rankings, they should not be neglected.

Behavioral factors

The behavioral group of factors is, without a doubt, the youngest in the formulas of search algorithms, but its importance is enormous and is second in importance after internal ones. To manipulate behavioral factors, I advise you to use the Userator exchange. Everything here is extremely simple - you need to register on the exchange, create a new campaign, enter URL address site being promoted and select the promotion region. The exchange allows you to increase behavioral factors in two modes: auto(using botnets) and manual(using real Internet users). To promote a request, you must use exactly manual mode, because scope of use automatic mode somewhat different. Next, you need to enter the queries necessary for promotion and set the desired number of transitions (the system itself will tell you the required number). It is worth noting one point - do not use behavioral influence on a request if it is located further than 50th place in organic results - Yandex simply will not use this data in ranking, it is clear what normal person will climb further than 50th place

Social signals

The next group of factors is social. It is convenient to influence it using the same Userator. Let's see how we can influence this group factors:

And here is the very factor influencing search results that Yandex promises to completely abandon. It is worth noting here that the links will continue to work, but only those links which are really high-quality and which real visitors click on. As I already said, Yandex with a pure heart announces the abolition of the link factor, by default transferring this group of factors to the social section. Getting users to click on links is simple - just use the exchange module Userator - link strengthening.

Summing up or false panic

Summarizing all of the above, the conclusion suggests itself that nothing terrible happened. Yandex is indeed gradually abandoning unnatural links without transitions in the Moscow region on a number of topics. Many sites have indeed lost positions and this trend will continue, covering more and more sites, in more topics and regions, but this is not at all scary and SEO, as many mistakenly believed, will not die... You just need to approach website promotion as diversified as possible, paying more and more attention to social and behavioral ranking factors. The ones who will suffer the most in this situation are the owners of sites that actively made money from selling links and the managers of the largest SEO exchanges on the Runet, although, on the other hand, relatively young exchanges that influence behavioral factors, on the contrary, will noticeably increase their profits, which can already be seen now ( On April 5, Userator increased the cost of behavioral promotion by almost 2 times, causing this to increase in loads).

Someone will actually go to Direct, which Yandex will no doubt be happy about, because that was its goal. In fairness, it is worth noting that the situation with the cancellation of the reference and the hype around this event can rightfully be considered one of best examples hidden viral marketing, which only the Runet has seen. Bravo Yandex!

And you can also order from me!