Yandex publishes the principles its ranking changes are tested against. They are worth reading not as marketing but as a statement of what the algorithm is optimised toward, which tells you what kind of work is durable.
The principles in practice
- Relevance to the user’s actual intent, not to the words they typed.
- Usefulness and reliability of the information presented.
- Safety: no malware, no deception, no misleading commercial claims.
- Convenience: the page has to load and be usable on the device it opens on.
Why this page matters
Every named violation and every algorithm update elsewhere in this knowledge base traces back to one of these four. When a client asks whether a tactic is risky, the useful question is which principle it works against.
Alien Road
How we apply this
We use these principles as the test for anything a client proposes that we are unsure about. If a tactic only makes sense on the assumption that the search engine will not notice, it fails all four and we say so before it is built.
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