Do regional subdomains work in Yandex? The short answer is a definitive “maybe”.
The long answer to this question is a bit more complex. There are some who believe that regional subdomains do help with rankings in Yandex, but there are also those who actively disagree and maintain that this does not have any effect at all.
Yandex is present in a total of 32 regions. Although Yandex is available in all of these countries, only 23 of them use the Yandex.ru domain name to list their websites for people in other countries to find. The locations that include addresses like yandex.ru, yandex.com and others are concentrated on the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Belarus.
Using regional subdomains for Yandex SEO
Although you can’t set up a top-level domain (e.g., .ru or .com) for a regional subdomain, you can set up subdomains for Yandex. For example, you can create the following DNS records and then access your Yandex-powered domain using a local IP address from any of the countries that are designated as a region in Yandex’s naming scheme:
noregional.yandex.ru – You can use this to designate a domain name that does not include “yandex.ru”. This is the ideal choice if you want to use your website with an address such as beaverbarber.com or mexicocitygirl.com .
*.yandex.ru – You can use this to designate a domain name that includes “yandex.ru”. This is the best choice for Russian speakers who want their website accessed from a different country than Russia, but with an address such as yandex.ru or even beaverbarber.com.
noresubdomain.yandex.ru – You can use this to designate a domain name that does not include “yandex.ru”. This is the ideal choice for those in Russia and other countries where Yandex is available, but where they would like their website’s address to be something other than yandex.ru or their own local domain name (such as .by).
noresubdomain.yandex.com – You can use this to designate a domain name that does not include “yandex.com”. This is the ideal choice for those in countries where Yandex is available, but where they would like their website’s address to be something other than yandex.com or their own local domain name (such as.by).
noresubdomain.yandex.net – You can use this to designate a domain name that does not include “yandex.net”. This is the ideal choice for those in countries like Russia where Yandex is available, but where they would like their website’s address to be something other than yandex.net or a local domain name.
