Digital library: Yandex clicks more than doubled in a year.

What we did

Six months of link acquisition with one rule: every placement is checked for indexation under both crawlers before it counts as delivered. Placements went into a register, and the junk inherited from earlier work went into a disavow file.

That is unglamorous and it is most of the job. A link on a page neither crawler has indexed is a receipt, not a link.

What it moved

Yandex clicks went from 60,281 in August 2025 to 137,727 in August 2026, up 128%. Book downloads from search — the action that matters here, not the visit — went from 81,306 to 121,008, up 49%.

The gap between the two percentages is itself informative: traffic grew faster than downloads, so some of the new visitors are landing further from the download than the old ones did.

The part that got worse

Google went the other way over the same year: 187,507 clicks in August 2025 against 96,773 in August 2026. Yandex growth does not close that hole, and we do not pretend it does.

Two search engines moving in opposite directions on one site usually means the work suited one and not the other. Diagnosing which of our own changes Google disliked is the current job, and it is not finished.

Services used on this project: Link building & digital PR, SEO.

Figures pulled by API from Yandex Metrica, Yandex Webmaster and Google Search Console on 26 October 2026. Every number can be opened in its source system on a call.