Are links dead for Yandex?
Yandex back links as a core ranking factor; it’s a dirty trick that’s been played for years in the commercial web landscape, especially in Russia.
However, back in December 2013, Yandex’s head of web search Alexander Sadovsky announced a shake-up in its algorithm, confirming that Yandex will no longer use back links as a ranking factor for commercial search queries.
This led to a lot of speculation. How is Yandex going to deal with such a major change? What are the repercussions? Which verticals will be more seriously affected by this change?
With this in mind, this article aims to shed some insight on how the update has affected SERPs and how Russian website owners should really deal with it.