Om January 27, 2023, Russia’s biggest and the world’s 4th largest search engine by market share, Yandex, had its source code repository leaked by a former employee/. The Yandex leak was shared in a file that contained what’s now believed to be 17, 854 search ranking factors.
But there is also a large percentage of SEOs who have openly dismissed the value of the Yandex leak. That brings up the question; are SEOs underestimating the Yandex Leak? You’d be surprised to learn about the number of SEOs who constantly dismiss the value of these documents.
In this blog post, we examine the most common objections against the Yandex leak by some SEOs in the digital marketing world. Let’s get started!
The Cope Repo is Outdated
You might assume that because the leaked files trace back to February 2022, then the code repository is obsolete. It’s not by accident that former employees of Yandex made the bold decision of leaking the code during that time since it is when Russia started the war against Ukraine. Realistically, they leaked the code to shine a light on Yandex’s widespread censorship and misinformation.
We can never deny that Yandex has an interest in making it seem like what leaked is mostly not in use any longer to minimize possible security risks. But come to think of it, at least some of archives for sure contain modern source code for company services as well as documentation pointing to real intranet URLs.
Yandex is Not Google
While performing a slight comparison of a few search results, you might notice that the overlap is quite small. Yandex has some overlap with similar results in the top 10 not for exact positions. You could argue about which results are ‘better’ and what ‘better’ even means when it comes to search.
Some claimthat Google is so much of a dominant search engine simply because it delivers exceptional results. But you’d be surprised to know that Yandex made close to $5B in revenue in 2021. All in all, Yandex is not far away from Google as many people make it sound in the first place.
Even though some SEOs still underestimate the Yandex Leak, it doesn’t have to be the case.The best way to go about this is to leverage the Yandex ranking factors as a basis of performing SEO tasks.
