Yandex Disagrees With Court Ruling Over “Smart Voting” SERPs

Query Monitoring appeared in Yandex Webmaster

Yandex stated that it disagrees with the court’s decision, according to which the search engine is prohibited from displaying results for the query “Smart Voting” in the search.

Yandex has said in a public statement that:

It is completely unclear from the document what exactly we are obliged to do and how it can be implemented.

On September 6, the Moscow Arbitration Court banned Google and Yandex from showing the phrase “smart voting” in search results. The lawsuit against the companies was filed by the Stavropol company Vulintertrade, which sells sheep wool.

At the time of writing, neither of the companies have yet removed or augmented search results for the query.

September 9 2021 Update

Yandex has removed links to Smart Voting from search results due to the inclusion of the focus website on the prohibited register.

 

Dan Taylor
Dan Taylor is an experienced SEO consultant and has worked with brands and companies on optimizing for Russia (and Yandex) for a number of years. Winner of the inaugural 2018 TechSEO Boost competition, webmaster at HreflangChecker.com and Sloth.Cloud, and founder of RussianSearchNews.com.