Yandex Penalties: SMS Fraud

In order to detect sites participating in the problem, Yandex periodically crawls a list of domains that have been identified as sources of fraudulent activities (SMS spam and fraud).

If a domain has not been detected as fraudulent by Yandex within the last 12 months, it receives a score of zero on this metric. The higher the score, the more penalized the domain will become.

What can you do to protect your website from SMS fraud?

The best way to protect your website is not to include links in text messages. However, if you are contracted by your customer to support their marketing programs on a regular basis, then using SMS will probably be unavoidable. The best way to avoid getting penalized by Yandex is to keep your SMS-link short and avoid using link shorteners.

A little advice: don’t be too assertive with the customer. If they want you too send them an SMS every week or two, it’s fine, but if they don’t pay their bills (entities that are under the control of their clients), there is no need for them to send messages.