March 29, 2024

34 thoughts on “Yep.com Changing the SEO Game? First Look + Ranking Factors

  1. Comments are all suspicious. ahrefs is amazing. What a great idea, the opportunity is here, and you're not even mentioning the coming take down of Google (anti trust hearings). The search results I've seen are excellent so when they get funding and ramp this up, they're going to be successful. The revenue share will interest a lot of people who are being squeezed out by Google. It might make Google rethink what they're doing. I hope Yep is very successful.

  2. Hi Nathan Gotch,

    I have a quetion

    Is backlink indexing important for keywords ranking?

    because I have made 45 backlinks, but only 2 backlinks are indexed now, so all 43 backlink is worthless for me?

  3. My takeaway:
    1. Keyword match domains
    2. Quantity of backlinks
    3. .edu, .gov are rewarded
    4. Total referring domains
    5. Tactics of penguin
    6. Exact match anchor text

  4. Maybe at this point, yep may want to focus on areas like understanding the users' search intent.

    But the tricky part being yep's perceived preference of using backlinks which is unlike Google's reliance on the massive data they have.

    And those backlinks by yep may not necessarily deliver the kind of results users desired (I tried a few recently on yep and did not get what I am looking for).

    Ultimately, if users don't get the type of results they want from the search engine, it's a waste of time IMHO.

  5. I am a (satisfied) customer of Ahrefs. I think the investment is worth for branding reasons for the SEO tool itself. There is no way to become a credible competitor of Google. But only the fact that we, as SEO consultants and experts, can make branding for the new search engine is well worth the investment, I think. Not to forget that the investment is made and planned without other investors, but is financed by internal resources (the customer base of 50K paid accounts, among them also my agency!).

  6. I’ve been saying for years that Google and YouTube need real competition to slow down the scalping of creators and sometimes completely stealing, as if you click on a YouTube video in Google, it plays outside of YouTube and the content creator gets nothing….

  7. Whole of your analysis is rather defective and biased.

    While presenting the Yep’s selling point, you made the statement that Google which is an aggregator does not reward the people producing the actual content. While elaborating that point, you then went on to say that you can earn by posting videos on YouTube, which is a Google owned entity, as YouTube displays adverts and shares its revenue with the publishers of the video content. Who exactly has been stopping you from displaying advertisements using Google Ads, or for that matter, any other advertisement platform on your textual content website? Had Google not found a way to help people monetize their content, other than news publishers, just about nobody would have been running blogs and content based websites. Almost the entirety of the mankind is busy trying to find ways to earn some extra income, and you would like your followers to believe that people are running websites without any monetary incentives? That’s patently incorrect. With the exception of Wikipedia, you would have an extremely hard time finding websites that do not display advertisements, and most of these websites that generate revenue through adverts rely on Google’s advertising network. Had you said that Google’s advert revenue share split is quite poor and it does not value authors’ work sufficiently enough, I would have had no hesitation agreeing with you. However, saying that Google has no mechanisms in place to reward authors’ work is simply incorrect.

    Saying that Google now assigns less importance to backlinks solely because of sophistication of its algorithms is once again highly contentious. I have been using Google for over a decade and a half now, and considering that I carry out multiple searches every day owing to my desire to verify stuff that I read online and also as a researcher who has already published a book, which is currently unavailable, and is planning to publish another one, I can say with very high degree of confidence that Google has started assigning much greater importance to freshness of content than it previously used to. Finding content published on highly authoritative websites with a wealth of backlinks on the first SERP has become quite difficult in the last couple of years. My comparative analysis suggests that it has more to do with freshness of the content than the quality of the content.

    When it comes to your observation concerning absence of localization in Yep’s results and this absence having its roots in privacy, it’s once again an extremely tenuous statement. In order to determine a person’s geographic location, Google does not need any specialized data that wouldn’t be available to Yep owing to its focus on privacy. Unless a person is relying on a VPN or Tor, whenever a user accesses a search engine, they, owing to the very nature of how the Internet works, reveal their IP to the search engine. Without a VPN or Tor, they simply cannot hide their IP, and based on their IP, search engines can show them localized results without asking the users to reveal any private information. Yep teams’ decision to assign little importance to localization is just a poor design decision on their part that has absolutely no roots in privacy concerns.

    Your last conclusion that founder of Yep and his team of software engineers have designed the whole of the algorithm solely to improve the ranking of their own Ahrefs website is quite tenuous. Considering that people are so very tuned to using Google in their daily lives, Yep’s team would have to offer excellent results to gain their trust, or just to make them consider switching to Yep for a second. By focusing their entire effort solely on the ranking of their own website, they do not stand any chance of providing excellent results across a broad spectrum of queries.

  8. Having built a search engine myself they are impossible to market, who actually needs and is searching for a better search engine ? Hardly anyone it’s a nearly impossible task to take them on

  9. Remember when Yandex tried to compete with Google? Google can't be competed with because of the Gmail account integration with other services, such as YouTube, Chrome, Docs, Drive, etc. So it will be very hard and not likely for any other product to replace Google. It's mostly like Samsing & Huwai VS iPhone. Not to mention that Yandex and Bing had billions of Dollars competing with Google, but %90 per cent of the world's traffic is still going through Google. Not only that, but also Google is good. I mean, it's not bad. For it to be replaced with something, it must be insufficient or bad, right? Even if you create a service/product that is better than Google, users still have to prefer it. Will they, though?

  10. I think it's just an investment, they have tons of data from ahrefs to use. I can't imagine them doing this only for a realstic reason. At the end, no one is gonna compete with Google.

  11. 90% of revenue. Interesting business model. That's a LOT different than 90% of profits. It will be interesting to see this play out – I see lawsuits in their future if they ever become significantly successful.
    In the few quick searches I did it seems like a TON of their results show the http version of pages with an unsecured symbol, while the sites have an https version, AND there's a heavier concentration of retailers like Amazon and Walmart in searches that are not products or necessarily buyer's -intent searches.

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