More search engines are getting strict. After Google, Yandex gives the heart stroke to SEO agencies. In Russia, Penguin Update known as AGS Update. . While Google has been quiet on the link penalty side, Yandex -- the largest Russian search engine -- has issued widespread link penalties on several hundred sites who deal in selling backlinks.

1. Yandex, Russia’s Largest Search Engine, Penalizes Hundreds Of Sites Selling Links
While Google has been quiet on the link penalty side, Yandex -- the largest Russian search engine --
has issued widespread link penalties on several hundred sites.
Yandex, the largest Russian search engine, reportedly penalized several hundred Web sites yesterday
that have participated in buying selling to artificially inflate rankings in the search engine.
The Russian Search Tips blog reported this based on a Yandex webmaster post. The link penalty, named
AGS, will “negatively affect organic rankings of the websites caught selling SEO links,” said Anna
Oshkalo.
The penalty doesn’t discriminate against large or small sites, or even well-known or less well-known
brands.
Yandex told Anna Oshkalo that a few big sites have been affected by this penalty, and in total “several
hundreds of sites were penalized by AGS” penalty.
Google is known for issuing both algorithmic and manual link penalties, but they haven’t announced
any significant penalties around links in a pretty long time.
Postscript: The story was updated to clarify that this penalty specifically targeted link sellers, not link
buyers. The penalty went ahead and set the Yandex TIC score (similar to Google’s PageRank) to zero
for sites who sold links. Yandex also has an algorithm that targets link buyers and that is named
Minusinsk, whereas the algorithm targeting link sellers is named AGS.