There is an opinion that Yandex, occupying a leading position in the Internet search market in Russia, does not just promote its services in public ways. And that with the help of “sorcerers” he pushes sites with better behavioral indicators than their own services to the back rows.
And that he, using the trust of his own audience, misleads users and offers not the most relevant sites, but his services. And this deprives market players of a significant share of profits, which fetters, and sometimes stops the development of these online services and, in general, the industry.
Let's figure out if that's the case. Write in the comments if you agree with this opinion.
Let's define terms. Snippet is a small piece of text that is shown to the user in the search results. Its purpose is to give the user the opportunity to choose which site to go to. The more users who see your snippet in the SERP, the greater the chance that they will get to your site.
CTR (Click to Rate) - snippet parameter - the percentage of people moving from the search results in relation to the total number of people who searched for something in the search engine for this phrase.
According to research (links at the end of the article), the lower the snippet is in the search results, the lower the percentage of people clicks on it. Those. The CTR of the snippet decreases if the site appears lower in the search results.
The CTR depends on the search query, on the topic, on the appearance of the snippet itself, etc. The specific value is not so important, further, for simplicity, we will take the value of CTR=20% for the first place in the organic issue. In this case, the snippet of the second place will be approximately 15%, in the third place 10-12%, etc. decreases with increasing space.
If you are the best site in the industry and rank first for relevant queries, then you could count on 20% of traffic (CTR = 20%). Usually, in the first places in organic search results, Yandex shows sites that have confirmed good user satisfaction. Each search engine has a system of metrics that evaluates not only the relevance of search results (i.e., how much the sites from the issue correspond to the user's query), but also how satisfied the users who have gone to each specific site are with the sites found - this is the basis of modern search.
What happens when a block with a height of 2-3 snippets appears between contextual advertising (Yandex.Direct) and organic search results. Is there one of the Yandex services in this block? That's right - the CTR of the first places in organic issuance is declining. If only because instead of the first or second screen, the snippet “leaves” to the second or third screen (for smartphone screens, this effect is even more pronounced).
Instead of the previous 20% of traffic, now the industry leader receives 10-12%. Those who previously received 10% will now receive 5%, and so on.
Let the site have 100 thousand visitors per day. Further, a simple calculation: if an Internet company receives half of the traffic from SEO (50 thousand), and Yandex makes up half of it (25 thousand), then after the appearance of a block with the Yandex service (the so-called sorcerers), these 25 thousand will remain only 12 thousand. It may seem insignificant, but what is 12 out of 100? This is 12% of traffic and means 12% of income. Here you can count pennies for a long time, talk about fixed and variable costs, about the features of a particular business. That's not the point. The given example of calculation is based on the experience of a real business, on the basis of real indicators, the figures are very close to the real ones. Such is life now.
Imagine that the margin of your business was 10% -15% and 12% of your profit “evaporates”? How many resources can you now spend on audience research, testing new technologies, and developing the product itself?
There would be no reason to worry if Yandex services were ranked in a general order and all market participants could participate on an equal footing - show the same bright and attractive super-snippets with pictures, tables, etc. Such an opportunity “as if” existed for a short time - a technology presented by Ilya Segalovich - Yandex.Islands (essentially - "sorcerers"). However, without leaving beta testing, it was curtailed. The official reason is that Webmaster Islands are worse in quality than Yandex's own Islands. Now "sorcerers" are available only to online services affiliated with Yandex. Here are a few more examples of sorcerers, you must admit, you won’t miss such a snippet, it’s hard to pass by:
Or so:
Yet:
Although even in this case, no one, except for Yandex developers, will ever know what multiplier (or other mechanism for artificially increasing relevance) is applied by Yandex to its own services in order to get more traffic.
Now Yandex is no longer just a search engine. This is an IT company that is building its empire. But does it do it honestly, or at the expense of other players, and does it mislead users by rigging organic results? Is the development of the industry slowing down due to manipulation, and what will we get in 3-5-10 years?
It turns out that the mega-corporation "feeds" users only with its own products, because other companies "could not stand the competition"? But the lack of competition leads to the fact that end users suffer.
Interesting on the topic:
- about different studies of CTR snippets.
- from Yandex (old, but the essence does not change).
- using EyeTracking technology (this time about Google).
Source: habr.com