Yandex leak reveals 1,922 search ranking factors

We have analyzed Yandex Leak’s search ranking factors, which include PageRank, Wikipedia Bonus and several other link-related factors

A former employee is accused of leaking a Yandex source code repository, which contains over 1,900 parameters used by search engines to rank websites in search results. Yandex Leak? Yes – The Russian Google.

According to the leak, Yandex used 1,922 ranking parameters in their search algorithm as of July 2022. On Twitter Martin MacDonald said it best: “The Yandex hack is perhaps the most exciting thing to have happened in SEO in years.”

The Hack gives interesting insights about how search engines do evaluate and rank your Website and we have deciphered each and every of those ranking factors for you. If you want to understand how a search engine like Google or Bing does rank your website, this is your blog post!

Yandex indeed is not the same as Google. It is a Russian technology company, it is for Russians what Google is for the western world, it is the most popular search engine. De facto some of their active engineers are former Google Search Engineers. If you intend to read the entire list of Yandex ranking determinants, keep in mind that Yandex Search Engine is not Google. If Yandex lists a ranking factor in the leaked data, it does not imply that Google gives that signal the same weight. In truth, Google may not apply all 1,922 mentioned parameters. In fact, several of the factors in this leak have been deprecated or are no longer used.

However, we can take for granted that many of these ranking indicators are quite similar to the signals used by Google for search these days. Reading this article will provide some important insights on how search engines, such as Google, work from a technology aspect.

Source Code

The leaked data appeared as a Torrent on a popular hacking forum the 26th of January 2023, as reported by Bleeping Computer:

…the leaker posted a magnet link that they claim are ‘Yandex git sources’ consisting of 44.7 GB of files stolen from the company in July 2022. These code repositories allegedly contain all of the company’s source code besides anti-spam rules.

Because the code appeared on a popular hacking forum, it was first thought that Yandex was hacked. Yandex has denied this, and provided the following statement:

“Yandex was not hacked. Our security service found code fragments from an internal repository in the public domain, but the content differs from the current version of the repository used in Yandex services.

A repository is a tool for storing and working with code. Code is used in this way internally by most companies.

Repositories are needed to work with code and are not intended for the storage of personal user data. We are conducting an internal investigation into the reasons for the release of source code fragments to the public, but we do not see any threat to user data or platform performance.”

According to several sources, the leaked Yandex Git Repository contains data and code about:

• Yandex search engine and indexing bot

• Yandex Maps

• Alice (AI assistant)

• Yandex Taxi

• Yandex Direct (ads service)

• Yandex Mail

• Yandex Disk (cloud storage service)

• Yandex Market

• Yandex Travel (travel booking platform)

• Yandex360 (workspaces service)

• Yandex Cloud

• Yandex Pay (payment processing service)

• Yandex Metrika (internet analytics)

A full list of all files and the Git Repository of the source code, you can see at the website from software engineer Arseniy Shestakov.

Grigory Bakunov, a former Yandex senior systems administrator, deputy chief of development, and director of spreading technologies, detailed the Yandex leak with BleepingComputer. He worked at the tech giant from 2002 until 2019. Bakunov said the data leak was political and that the rogue Yandex employee had not tried to sell the code to competitors.

The former top official said that the breach does not contain customer data and does not directly harm Yandex users’ privacy or proprietary technology. It is “only code”.

As of now you can still download the entire list of Yandex Ranking Factors although Yandex for sure will try to get every copy of it deleted within the next days.

Several Users on Twitter analyzed the leaked data with the hashtag #yandexleak the last two days – first thread, second thread – analyzing the various ranking factors. If you really want to dig deep into the whole source code leak and its technical data we highly recommend reading the Twitter thread here from Michael King. You further can find information about the Yandex Data Leak on Russian Search News.

Many of Yandex’s ranking factors are what a SEO Consultant would expect to see:

• PageRank and many link-related factors (e.g., age, relevancy, etc.).

• Text relevancy.

• Content age and freshness.

• End-user behavior signals.

• Host reliability.

• Some sites get preference or better said bonus (e.g. the English Wikipedia).

Some of the ranking factors on the other side SEO Consultants may find surprising: number of unique visitors, percent of organic traffic and average domain ranking across queries for example. Furthermore, the leaked code contains many of removed or deprecated factors as well.

In the following you see our translation and explanation of the first ten Yandex Search Ranking Factors, you can download the list with our full explanation of the Search Ranking Factors here: