Many SEOs and SEO agencies aspire to run SEO automatically, using technology. Not surprisingly, it turns out that search engines are thinking along similar lines. Ilya Segalovich, the CTO of Yandex, mentioned during my visit to Yandex in Moscow, that he expects it to become easier to build search engines and that Google and Yandex’s competition is most likely to come from technologies based largely around “open source” style software readily available to developers.

The specific technologies which are likely to become “commoditized” in this way include crawlers, indexing and even machine learning algorithms. Says Ilya, “You won’t need 2,000 engineers to build a decent search engine. At some point, this will make search more competitive because more search engine components will be readily available and you’ll have the ability to achieve reach quickly.”

Don’t Ask A Search Engine Engineer How To Rank Your Site!

Yandex has adopted machine learning in a big way and I had a conversation with two of the brains behind the approach, Andrey Gulin and Andrey Plakhov.

Yes, you have to be named “Andrey” to get a senior post at Yandex! Andrey and Andrey did their best to explain to an “SEO” how their system works with Andrey Gulin amusingly saying along the way, “We’re surprised when SEOs ask how to rank my site, because I don’t know.” If you want to know why he says that – read on!

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