Yandex Link value is BACK

Aaron Bradley originally shared:   This makes no sense.  Yandex is bringing back links as a ranking factor because the number of paid links in the ecosystem didn`t go down as much as Yandex had hoped?  I`m confused.

(I`ve tried and tried, but I haven`t heard one word from any search on what impact removing links as a ranking factor had on the quality of the SERPs.  My kingdom to be fluent in Russian!:)

"Why are Yandex making this change? About a year ago Yandex head of Search, Alexander Sadovsky, announced that they will begin to disregard links as a ranking-factor. This was big news in the SEO-world since links have been one of the major ranking factors up until that point. They expected the number of link buyers to go down rapidly when they announced the non-link policy a year ago. However, the result (according to themselves) was that the number of Paid links only dropped with around 16 % in total. So the reason for this turn around is to speed everything up and clean up the link mess that is still live and kicking in Russia." IMPORTANT Yandex Link value is BACK + link buyers will be penalized!