FAQ about hCard

How is the marked up data processed? How soon does it appear in Yandex Business?

The data is extracted from the organization's card when the Yandex search robot is indexing your site. Sites are crawled at different speeds. It usually depends on how often the site is updated.

Add pages with marked up contact information to the sitemap file to inform the robot that these pages are important.

Before being added to Yandex Business, the data received from the card is reviewed by a moderator. The review takes up to 2 weeks.

How else can I add data to Yandex Business?

Apart from hCard microformat, you can use the public Yandex Business form or add data on the Site region page in Yandex Webmaster. The latter way is better for the site owner, since it allows you to track the request processing and check out the error information.

You can use whichever way you prefer.

What is the difference between using hCard and Yandex Webmaster?

With hCard, you communicate your contact information not only to Yandex, but to the whole world. Address markup is a good practice in site creation. You can implement it yourself and skip registering in Yandex Webmaster. If the address or the phone changes, you just need to update the information on your site.

Using Yandex Webmaster to add and edit contact information has several advantages. The information in Yandex Business is updated faster, and you can track the moderation process.

Information from the hCard markup and from Yandex Webmaster is added to a single database. That's why you can view and edit the data added in hCard in Yandex Webmaster.

When should I use hCard?

hCard markup is helpful when you create a new site: it automatically gets added to both the search index and Yandex Business, with no action required on your part.

You may also prefer the hCard markup if your organization has an extensive branch network and the addresses changes relatively often. When the contact information on your site changes, it also changes automatically in Yandex Business. You don't have to do anything to keep it up to date.

Does Yandex process personal data marked up with hCard?

No, currently Yandex processes organization cards.

How safe is using semantic markup?

hCard is a fully open format. This means that you can't control which services extract the data and how they use it. However, any publicly available information may be used by hackers. Semantic markup just facilitates extracting data from the page body. Avoiding it doesn't guarantee security.

In any case, it is up to you which microformats to use and which data exactly to mark up.