From reviewing years of algorithm monitoring data, and looking at a number of search visibility graphs across a number of Russian websites (varying in sectors from grocery and fashion retail, to travel and consumer technology – and data suggests that in July 2019 there was a change made to Yandex’s algorithm – an unconfirmed algorithm update.
During this period, a number of websites within Russia witnessed considerable changes (both positive and negative), despite third-party algorithm monitoring showing July 2019 (and the surrounding period) to be relatively “calm” in terms of SERP volatility.
Examples of websites who saw significant change during this period are grocery e-tailer Lenta:
Global furniture giant Ikea also saw a traffic decline in the Russian market correlating with a potential July 2019 update.
Other example websites seeing a decline can be found across most sectors, including the travel sector, home furnishings, marketing consultancy websites.
Likewise, other sites saw an uplift at the start of July. One example being Russian classifieds website uslugio.com:
The Услуджио site has since seen a decline in performance which correlates with the turn of the new year.
Yandex doesn’t openly comment, confirm, nor deny specific algorithm updates or broad core algorithm updates, but having reviewed a large number of websites over the past few weeks that there are too many correlations across many different websites (in very different verticals) to not be speculative that an update did occur during July 2019.
