In a talk by Elena Pershina, head of B2B Marketing for Non-Advertising services at Yandex, the search engine gave some insight into how webmasters can establish a “quality” website.
Elena began her talk by noting that the website and business, to Yandex, have become separate entities over the past couple of years, and the website is more of a proxy for the business as a whole and not a sole representation, and that for good ranking positions within Yandex you not only need a good website that is “optimized for SEO”, but also a business that’s generating the right signals for the search engine.
We can draw similarities here with Google, that the business itself needs both reputation and EAT.
In 2018, Yandex applied a quantitative, external facing metric known as the ICS to webmasters to indicate a website’s quality. Over the past two years, this metric has been refined to become a trusted metric that some Russian SEOs believe is updated on an almost monthly basis.
The ICS score is combined with other measures of business/website quality such as the CLI (Customer Loyalty Index) in Yandex.Directory.
We thought for a long time how to give a signal to the business that something is wrong with customer service. The user found it once, made a call and never returns. To track such moments, to understand how often the user wants to search for you, we made a customer loyalty index.
The CLI allows the business to take on feedback from users, and improve, as well as allowing Yandex to actively record user sentiment and satisfaction to the associated products and services.
Elena also confirmed that Yandex are working harder to better understand user-generated content and reviews in relation to a business, and to better identify scam businesses or just really bad potential customer experiences.
