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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/massive-yandex-code-leak-reveals-russian-search-engines-ranking-factors/ [arstechnica.com]

Nearly 45GB of source code files, allegedly stolen by a former employee, have revealed the underpinnings of Russian tech giant Yandex's many apps and services. It also revealed key ranking factors for Yandex's search engine, the kind almost never revealed in public.
[...]
As detailed by Buraks (in two [twitter.com] threads [twitter.com]), Yandex's engine favors pages that:

• Aren't too old
• Have a lot of organic traffic (unique visitors) and less search-driven traffic
• Have fewer numbers and slashes in their URL
• Have optimized code rather than "hard pessimization," with a "PR=0"
• Are hosted on reliable servers
• Happen to be Wikipedia pages or are linked from Wikipedia
• Are hosted or linked from higher-level pages on a domain
• Have keywords in their URL (up to three)

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