We’re always talking about the various different penalties and algorithms that Google and Bing put into place to help protect their search results from any manipulation – but what about the other search engines out there? Yandex has recently launched a new update to their algorithm called AGS which targets link sellers and negatively effects the organic rankings of websites caught selling SEO links.
In total it has been reported that several hundred websites were penalized by the AGS algorithm update. The penalty however is much easier to remove than say a Google penalty. If you get penalized by Yandex simply remove the paid SEO links and once the Yandex bot re-crawls your website the lost rankings may be restored.
While the new update was targeted towards solely link sellers, Yandex also runs an algorithm called Minusinsk which targets link buyers that was placed into action earlier this year. Official Yandex figures state that the total of 3683 sites were affected by the Minusinsk algorithm, and only about 20% of them, or more precisely 687 sites, have managed to get that penalty lifted so far.
Frankly nobody should be buying or selling links these days.