Yandex is going to review its algorithm against over-optimized content

If Yandex decides, that a web page contains too many keywords, then keyword rankings may go down in the search results. However, if the webmaster fixes the problem rankings will be restored, but it could take up to 2-3 weeks. For this reason, Yandex recommends reviewing the content against usability right now.

 

The Russian SEOnews portal requested comments from Yandex representatives to find out more about potential penalties. Will be the whole web-site affected once these over-optimised pages are detected, or only the spam pages itself? What content will be seen as over-optimized and what will be an acceptable amount of keywords per page?

Yandex's answer was short, but meaningful:

"Usually a change of position only affects the "bad" pages. The percentage of keywords on the page is not the only factor which affects the algorithm. That's why we recommend creating unique and quality content for users and not calculate the "optimal" percentage of the keywords per page."

So, here's yet another example of search engines following Google's lead with their algorithm design

It's a well known fact that Yandex's algorithm has always been a few years behind Google, Bing and Yahoo, owing its relative youth as a company. Google put a stop to keyword stuffing a few years ago and Yandex has finally caught up in 2011.

In 2009, Yandex began sponsoring an open algorithm competition for developers, which could explain the significant growth and improvement of the Yandex algorithm in the past couple of years; however it still has a long way to go before it can rival the sophistication of Google's.

by Katia Guseva

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