Yandex introduced new signals to the Proxima search quality metric.
They are designed to improve the ranking of sites. Mikhail Slivinsky (Yandex) spoke about this at the Tenth Webmaster Conference (March 2021).
Mikhail noted that there are billions of pages in the search. When there are many relevant answers, it is difficult to choose the best one, so Yandex is constantly adding new quality signals. These signals allow you to more subtly assess the differences between pages.
Two signals that were added to the Proxima quality metric and led to better ranking:
- Commercial quality component
- Additional aspects of quality
A commercial quality component consists of a large number of aspects with understandable physical meanings: quality of description, cost of delivery, ease of ordering, etc. The introduction of this component has improved the quality of search and allowed users to find the products they are looking for faster and easier.
Additional quality aspects have been introduced to rank higher sites with more reason to trust their content. The innovation affected the ranking of resources from the field of medicine, financial services and legal services.
Mikhail noted that this topic is quite sensitive, it is important to help the user not to make a mistake. Introductions of new signals are intended to replace not-so-authoritative content with content that you can trust, which is written and tested by professionals such as doctors.
Mikhail did not specify when the new signals were added, but noted that Yandex is constantly introducing improvements to the Proxima search quality metric.
