Behavioural-factor
manipulation protection

Behavioural-factor (BF) manipulation is the artificial distortion of a site's behavioural signals in Yandex (and to a lesser extent Google) search. Competitors hire 'black SEO' services and bots visit the target site from search, fake a fast bounce (returning to SERP within 5-15 seconds) or a single short pageview. The Yandex Typhoon algorithm interprets this as a low-quality signal and drops the rankings.

Signals: an unexplained spike in bounces in Yandex.Metrica, falling rankings on high-volume commercial queries, surges of traffic from specific regions or ASNs, anomalous visit patterns (identical session length, entry only from SERP, no deep pageviews).

We analyse 40+ signals: TLS signature (JA3/JA4), ASN reputation, fingerprinting (canvas, WebGL, fonts), behavioural patterns (mouse speed and curve, timings between events). A real human moves the mouse along Bezier curves at 80-400 px/s, a bot moves in a straight line or instantly. The combination of suspicious signals delivers 99.9% accuracy with under 0.1% false positives.

Usually 2-4 weeks after activation. Yandex needs time to recompute behavioural factors on clean traffic. If the manipulation went on for a long time, recovery may take up to 2 months. BotHunt blocks bots from the moment of activation; the rest depends on the Yandex ranker.

No. Search crawlers are whitelisted by ASN and user agent. YandexBot, Googlebot, Bingbot, Mail.ru Bot, Apple Bot and AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) pass through without checks. The site stays indexable.

Yandex looks at many factors at once — behaviour, link profile, click-through rate, time on site, page depth. But mass coordinated bot traffic on one site creates a characteristic bounce pattern that the algorithm reads as a demotion signal. An anti-bot breaks this chain.

Blocker scripts work on the Metrica side and prevent the event from being sent for suspicious visits. That's better than nothing, but the bot still hits the site, loads the server and may leave traces in logs. BotHunt blocks bots at the edge or in the PHP agent — before Metrica even loads. That's full protection, not cosmetics.

The Site plan is $9/month for 1 site, Studio — $29/month for 5 sites. Compare that with the typical cost of competitor manipulation — $50-150/month. ROI is positive from the first month. 14-day free trial, no credit card required.