Several months ago the head of Web Search at Yandex announced the changes in ranking algorithm. Namely - links will no longer be counted as ranking factor. This has provoked a lot of discussions among the Internet users. Some SEO specialists started to panic, others took this quietly or even were pleased with this change. But at the conference of Yandex.Direct there appeared a new announcement in which it was noted that the link ranking will still be cancelled soon, but these changes will concern only the half of the commercial queries. And judging by this statement, the SEO professionals who did not react to this news at all, were right. Many do not believe in such statements but it is better to be prepared for possible innovations. In this blog we’ll consider the main consequences of this Yandex decision and what can be done about it so that your site does not fall out of the rank.
First of all, you should not worry about the introduction of this algorithm. This change will initially affect just Moscow region, and will cover only half of commercial queries. So keep on developing your sites and get good results.
It is hard to predict the consequences of such innovation, but we can offer some suggestions:
- the people who were involved into links purchase only will be pushed aside from the market;
- SEO companies that provide services for rapid link growth will disappear;
- the demand for contextual advertising will increase;
- low quality links will not be treated as a ranking factor (now, in fact, the very little attention is paid to them as well);
- internal and external factors will become even more important (text, reference, behavioral, commercial, social, internal domain factors).
Let’s look at the last point more closely to determine exactly what all these factors refer to:
- Textual factors include: texts, unique content, keywords saturation, spelling and syntax, semantic core of texts, etc.
- Reference factors include the number and quality of links that refer to your site.
- Behavioral factors include: the number of you site’s visitors, interest of users, time the users spend on the site, number of viewed pages, number of returns to the site, failure rate.
- Commercial factors include: authority of the site, site’s usability, level of trust.
- Social factors include: links and traffic from social networks (the latter is not very important now because it has start to develop actively only since the end of 2013).
- Internal domain factors include: age of the site, URL of the pages, etc.
Finally, we’ll enumerate the main actions that will allow you to avoid search engine filter in the future:
- only high quality links should be on the site;
- low-quality links should be removed;
- the usability of the site should be taken into consideration;
- one should also strive to improve all of the above factors.
All these will affect not only site ranking and traffic results but also the conversion.
Yandex announcement about the removal of link ranking is very loud, but only time and practice will tell us whether it will be executed or not. Our opinion is that links will continue to be one of ranking factors but only if right link weight building strategy is implemented.