Publication date: 23 May 2019

A warning from Yandex “According to Yandex’s data, this site could be used for fraud” appeared in search results in 2013 and has been used to tag websites in Yandex browser or in other browsers which accept information from Yandex about malicious activity, for example in Opera browser. Owners of websites started to wonder what principles Yandex is guided by when tagging sites: bugs in the code, viruses, hacker attacks…No answer has been found yet. There was even a theory that competitors attack sites and press “report a website” or “mark as fraud” buttons.

Yesterday, most of gambling websites were tagged with the warning “According to Yandex’s data, this site could be used for fraud”. The tagging spread far and wide: casino sites which accept money, review or doorway pages which only have links to some casino sites.

Webmasters are still wondering what serves as a signal to Yandex: slots codes on websites, payment options, a certain keyword density, or something else.

About 80% of RU casinos have faced this problem. Yandex is probably working on an algorithm to implement the law prohibiting money transfers to/from gambling operators.

Tagged websites do not get lower in Yandex search results, but the warning deters users from visiting them, and traffic volumes are definitely dropping.

A similar thing has recently taken place on Telegram: some channels, accounts, and bots were accidentally tagged with a red scam sign. Supposedly, most of the channels were from the “sales” and “others” categories. There were 45 Russian, 2 Ukrainian, one English, and one Uzbek channels with their total audience of 1.7 million people. Administrators of these suspicious channels also got this tag in their profiles. Channels with the Scam tag do not appear in search results, and you can visit them only if you have a direct link.

Let’s try to find something positive in this situation. It all sounds very interesting and makes webmasters who work with RU market move forward. Every day you find new ways to get around bans. Thank you for working on your professional development!