Yandex disables link ranking

On December 5, 2013, at the IBC Russia 2013 conference, the head of Yandex’s search services, Alexander Sadovsky, announced that Yandex would no longer take into account links in its formula for ranking sites for commercial queries. Ranking sites by information queries will work the same way as before. The new formula will start working only for Moscow for now, but over time, links will no longer be taken into account when ranking sites in other regions.

Yandex strives to give the user an answer to his request as quickly and accurately as possible. In pursuit of this goal, Yandex wants to fill the search results with sites with high-quality and relevant content, easy navigation, and avoid the issuance of sites with technical errors, and sites “clogged with borrowed or meaningless content.” Therefore, over the past few years, we have seen a decrease in the role of link ranking factors and an increase in the weight of factors reflecting Yandex’s assessment of the attractiveness of a site’s design, user-friendliness of interfaces, and the usefulness of information. “Yandex” has long and consistently fought against “pseudo-optimization of sites”, based only on the purchase of commercial links and ignoring the qualitative development of the content of the web project.

Obviously, the change in the algorithm will hit the business of link aggregators and link exchanges. They will be forced to either significantly reorganize their business or leave the market, but the owners of sites for which buying links was the only way to promote will suffer the maximum losses from a change in the ranking formula. They will have to give way in the issuance of more far-sighted competitors who did not save on the development and promotion of their web projects.

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