Yandex is Russia’s largest search engine. It has a reputation for high quality search results, and recently, it has started to publish guidelines on what makes a web page ‘low quality’.
What Yandex Says…
Facts Are Key
It says that articles should be backed up by accurate facts. Sometimes they will manually check facts. You should use online sources for your facts (not Wikipedia). If you can’t find an online source, use printed material like books or encyclopedias – Yandex likes sources that are more ‘trustworthy’.
Don’t Use Shortcuts
Yandex does not like ‘shortcut’ ways of doing things. So don’t use tricks like ‘unusual capitalisation’ to get a better spot in search results. Don’t try and bend SEO rules (Google has said similar things).
No Malware Please
Yandex does not want to rank sites that have malware on them. This is because internet users are more concerned about malware than online reputation these days. The company says that some of the worst, most spammy sites are those that have been hacked and used to host malware.
No Viruses Or Phishing
Again, this is malware related and extends to both websites and emails. Yandex fans have complained that their account passwords are often stolen via phishing websites and emails. These sites do not help when it comes to search engine rankings, or online protection.
Stay Away from Robots
Yandex does not like anything that looks like robots or ‘automated software’. The search engine would rather see content written by humans than machines. So anything that is automatically generated is frowned upon. It wants to know who is the owner of the website or web page in question, hence a problem with robots and automated software.
Legacy Domains Are Not Welcome
Yandex is particularly keen on new sites and web pages. It does not like sites that have been around for a while. The company says that it wants to see new domains that are not already established in the search results. This is because ‘legacy’ sites and domains often have low quality content or are considered spam.
