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Daniel is CTO at rhome GmbH, and Co-Founder at Aqarios GmbH. He holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from LMU Munich, and has published papers in reinforcement learning and quantum computing. He writes about technical topics in quantum computing and startups.
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# Leaked list of 1923 SEO factors of yandex search

SEO has always been mainly characterized by the arms race between search engine providers such as Google or Yandex and SEO specialists. Well, today has been quite an amazing day for public SEO - a large amount of the source code of Yandex was leaked, which includes amongst others a list of 1923 search engine factors / SEO factors.

Since in the original source code the descriptions are all in Russian, I've translated them to English (note, I did not go through all 1923 factors, there could be some translation errors).

You can find the list of 1923 factors here.

I find a few of them quite interesting.

1/ Notably there are quite a lot of checks across basically everything the host can give to find whether the site could be spam - this includes checking whois information, the site realiablity (i.e., how many 400/500 errors the site has),

2/ There is also a large group of user behavior related checks, such as how long a user visited the site, what they clicked, basically the whole user journey. Look for "entropy"-related factors in the list of factors that I shared, those are all related to how the user behaves statistically. This also includes how "rapid" the user clicks, which I find quite interesting.

3/ There are also some super naive looking (but likely effective against spam, else they wouldn't be included) checks such as how many slashes the URL contains, or whether there are any digits, or whether certain specific phrases are contained, that I won't quote here since I would be impacting this blog negatively lol.

4/ Site types: There are factors whether the site is a blog/forum, shop, news, etc., or whether it is related to law and finance.

5/ Wikipedia is also boosted specifically, and TikTok has its own factor.

6/ One major factor (or list of factors) is how natural the text reads, or how "nasty" it is (literally called the "nasty content factor").

7/ There are a lot of factors related to geography, e.g. matching the language of the user that is visiting the link has impact. Or the distance of the request to the city Magadan or Ankara. Huh?

8/ There are factors related to having a playable video on the page and having downloadable files (including videos).

9/ Looking at the war between Russia and Ukraine - there are also factors indicating whether the site is in Russian or Ukrainian.

10/ SUPER interesting: "Url is a channel/post from a verified social network account" -> makes sense of course, but having a verified social media account refer to a URL could be a boost on par with having a nice backlink.

11/ And lastly, of course, there are standard SEO factors that include PageRank, backlinks, Trust Ratio (TR), BM25, and so on..

Check out the list yourself - ping me if you have awesome insights to include in this post.

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