How Bing, Yandex, Baidu and Naver treat links
Links matter in every major search engine except Naver, but the evidence is uneven. Bing publishes guidelines, Yandex leaked its ranking factors in 2023, and Baidu and Naver have little recent primary documentation.
In short
- Bing treats links as a quality and discovery signal and removed its disavow tool in October 2023.
- A leak of Yandex source code in January 2023 exposed a list of 1,922 ranking factors, including link age, link relevance and penalties for sudden link bursts.
- Yandex removed links from commercial ranking in Moscow in 2014 and brought them back in 2015, according to reports from the time.
- Baidu launched its Green Radish algorithms against link selling and paid advertorial links in 2013.
- On Naver, backlinks are a weak factor and off-page work means content inside Naver's own platforms.
Google is not the only engine that reads links, and it is not the only one that fights link spam. Bing, Yandex and Baidu all use links and all have anti-spam systems aimed at them. Naver is the exception: it ranks mainly on content inside its own platforms.
The quality of evidence differs a great deal between engines, so each section below says what kind of source it rests on.
The four engines at a glance
| Engine | Role of links | Known anti-link-spam measures | Quality of evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bing | A quality and discovery signal | Devaluation or delisting for link schemes; disavow tool removed in 2023 | Official guidelines |
| Yandex | Many link factors among 1,922 leaked | Penalties for link bursts and commercial anchors; Minusinsk algorithm | Leaked code from 2023, described by Yandex as outdated |
| Baidu | Matter, with weight on Chinese and relevant sources | Green Radish 1.0 and 2.0 in 2013 | Secondary guides; no recent primary source |
| Naver | Weak | Not link-centred | Secondary sources |
Bing
Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines list what it ranks on, roughly in order: relevance, quality and credibility, user engagement, freshness, location and page load time. Links sit under quality and discovery. The guidelines say Bing wants to see links grow organically, and that link buying, link schemes and link farms can lead to devaluation or delisting.
Bing removed its disavow tool in October 2023. Announcing it, Fabrice Canel of Bing wrote: “Times have changed, and so has our technology.” The message is the same one Google gives: the engine believes it can ignore bad links without your help.
Bing Webmaster Tools still offers a backlink report for any site, including competitors, which makes it a free second source when you track backlinks.
Two points deserve a caution:
- Bing’s reach is bigger than its market share. Bing’s index powers, or has powered, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia and the launch version of ChatGPT search. How much ChatGPT depends on Bing today is less certain, because those arrangements shifted during 2025 and 2026. See how AI search chooses sources.
- The “Bing likes exact-match anchors” claim has no primary source. Practitioners widely believe that Bing gives a little more weight than Google to exact-match anchors, domain age and social signals. Treat it as folklore that may be true.
Yandex
Between 25 and 27 January 2023 a former employee leaked about 44GB of Yandex code, including a list of 1,922 ranking factors. Yandex confirmed the leak and said the code was outdated.
The link-related factors identified by analysts include:
- PageRank
- Link age, with older links treated as better
- Link relevance, by text and by topic
- The share of links coming from the same host, or from homepages
- The number of links from top-ranked hosts
- The ratio of “good” to “bad” backlinks
- Penalties for sudden bursts of links and for a high share of commercial anchors
- Query words in anchor text
- Whether a page has no inbound links at all (orphan pages are penalised)
- URL depth, and links from the homepage to important pages
Many of the other factors were behavioural: clicks, time on page and returning users. That foreshadowed what the US antitrust case later confirmed about Google’s use of clicks.
Yandex also supplies the best natural experiment on whether a search engine can do without links. According to reports from the time, it removed links from commercial ranking in the Moscow region in 2014, then brought them back in 2015 together with Minusinsk, an algorithm aimed at link spam. We have not re-checked the original coverage, but the episode is well known: a major engine tried to drop links and reversed course.
The caveat is simple. Yandex is not Google. Use the leak to understand how search engineers think about links, not as a list of Google factors. For what is known about Google, see the leak and the antitrust documents.
Baidu
Backlinks matter on Baidu, with the emphasis on quality and on sources that are in Chinese, hosted in China and topically relevant. This comes from specialist agency guides, not from Baidu documentation.
Baidu has run its own campaigns against link trading. Green Radish 1.0, in February 2013, targeted link sellers and buyers. Green Radish 2.0, in July 2013, targeted paid advertorial links. Other named algorithms, such as Hurricane and Pomegranate, deal with content.
Three practical points follow from the guides:
- Baidu favours its own properties: Baike, Zhidao, Tieba and Baijiahao. Off-page work in China often means being present on those platforms.
- An ICP licence and hosting in mainland China affect how much Baidu trusts a site.
- Older correlation studies showed a strong relationship between backlinks and top-ten Baidu rankings. They are dated and their methods are unclear, so we give them little weight.
We found no reliable primary source from 2025 or 2026 on how Baidu weighs links today. Anyone quoting precise figures for Baidu should be asked where they came from.
Naver
On Naver, backlinks are a weak factor. Naver ranks largely on the quality of sources and documents inside its own ecosystem, through two systems:
- C-Rank measures how far a creator or source can be trusted on a topic, based on consistency and engagement.
- D.I.A. and D.I.A.+ analyse individual documents for how well they match intent and show real experience.
Off-page SEO for Korea therefore means Naver Blog, Naver Cafe, Knowledge iN and influencer content, not link building in the Google sense. This description rests on secondary sources and we rate it medium confidence.
Other engines
DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Ecosia rely mainly on Bing’s index. Brave runs an independent index. Seznam in Czechia has historically used its own ranking measure, S-Rank.
AI assistants retrieve from search indexes, so rankings won with links feed indirectly into what the assistants cite.
What this means for a link strategy
- One profile, several engines. A link that Google counts will usually count on Bing too. You do not need a separate Bing link campaign.
- The same things get punished everywhere. Link buying at scale, sudden bursts and heavy commercial anchors appear in Bing’s guidelines, the Yandex factor list and Baidu’s algorithm history.
- China and Korea are platform markets. Budget for presence on Baidu’s and Naver’s own properties before you budget for links.
- Be honest about the evidence. For Baidu and Naver, most advice online is second-hand. Test locally before you scale spend.
Where to go next
Read how search engines evaluate links for the Google model these engines are compared against, and how AI search chooses sources for which index each assistant draws on. Terms such as C-Rank and Minusinsk are defined in the glossary.
Common questions
Do backlinks matter for Bing?
Yes. Bing's guidelines treat links as a signal of quality and a way to discover pages, say Bing wants links to grow organically, and warn that link buying and link schemes can lead to devaluation or delisting.
Does Bing have a disavow tool?
No. Bing removed its disavow links feature in October 2023, saying its technology had moved on.
Does the Yandex leak show how Google ranks pages?
No. Yandex is a different engine and said the leaked code was outdated. The leak shows how search engineers think about links, which is useful background and nothing more.
How do you do link building for Naver?
Mostly you do not. Naver ranks largely on the trust of sources and documents inside its own ecosystem, so off-page work in Korea means Naver Blog, Cafe, Knowledge iN and influencer content.
