Site regionality

Site region plays an important role in the Yandex search results. When the users enter a location-dependent query, they prefer to see the results from their region, rather than from other cities. For example, when a user from Moscow searches for information about car servicing using the request [auto repair]. Most likely, they want to find the nearest car service garage. In this case, if the site is assigned the region Moscow or Russia, the site will be displayed in the search results.

Note. If a region is assigned to the site, it doesn't exclude the site from search results in other regions. It can be found by users from any region if the site content is recognized as relevant to the queries.

To assign a region to the site:

After you add or change data in Yandex.Webmaster or Business Directory, the moderator checks it for compliance with the content of your site. To make sure that it passes moderation:

  • Contacts and delivery information are placed in a prominent position.
  • The site is accessible and its pages are displayed correctly.
  • The site is virus free. You can check this in the Diagnostics → Site security section in Yandex.Webmaster.
You should also follow the recommendations for the placement and completeness of contact information, as well as other data confirming the site region.

The organization operates in a single region

  • Specify the full address of your organization on the site, including the postal code and the city phone code. Do not place the address and the phone only as an image.
  • If the site has a regional focus, add more information relevant to this region.

  • If your site has regional versions, the content that the user sees may vary depending on the region they came to the site from. In this case, the site region is identified by the user's IP address. For example, your company has offices in different cities. The users from Moscow and Khabarovsk will see different versions of the site.

    The Yandex robot crawls the site from a certain IP address of a particular region. Therefore, it will receive only one version of the site. As a result, some of the content won't be indexed.

    To index the entire site, we recommend that you make all pages accessible to the robot, regardless of its IP address. How to detect the Yandex search robot

The organization has offices in different regions

If your organization has several regional offices, specify the addresses and phone numbers of each of them on the site. As a result, the site can be assigned multiple regions. You can also use subdomains. This will allow the user to see how the main site and the regional site are related.

Attention. Make sure the content of a subdomain differs from that of the primary domain. If their content is completely duplicated or is only slightly different, one of the URLs will be recognized as a secondary mirror of the other one. The Yandex robots will then start treating two sites as one. As a result, the site recognized as the secondary mirror will be excluded from the search results.

To use subdomains:

  • Add the name of the appropriate region to the subdomain URL (for example, spb.example.com).

  • A regional subdomain should contain information for the users from the region.

  • A regional subdomain should be included in the navigation on the main site so that the user could go from the main page to the regional page.

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