When Do You Need A Subdomain For Local Ranking In Yandex?

Yandex search contains signals about the regionality of sites and pages, so you can inform it about the regions that the site and business focus on.

This information can be interpreted by the search as one of the possible signals. To choose the right region for the site, it is important to determine the audience of users to which the proposals are targeted.

You can configure the site region in Yandex.Webmaster in the Regionality section.

It is important to leave contact information in the header or footer of the site. Also, contact information can be specified in a separate section of the site, and on the main page, place a link to this section. If we are talking about an online store with delivery throughout Russia, then in the Webmaster you need to specify the region “Russia”.

Expecting that the binding of the region in the Webmaster and individual subdomains will improve the presentation of the site in search results, some resource owners create a huge number of them. In fact, such an approach may have the opposite effect due to such features as:

  • Internal competition. In search results, subdomains with the same or similar content will compete with each other.
  • Server load. Suppose a catalog of 5,000 products is hosted on one subdomain. If there are 10 identical sites for each region, then instead of 5,000 pages the robot will have to crawl 50,000. This is an additional load on the server.
  • Long indexing. The more pages the sites have, the longer the search robot crawls them. Therefore, a robot that is busy bypassing duplicates will get to important pages with a huge delay.
  • The complexity of customization. It is necessary to add each subdomain to the Webmaster and create a sitemap.xml file for it. In addition, you need to monitor the status of all sites: if an error appears on the page, you will have to fix it on all subdomains with the same content.

If there is one site, but some of its pages change depending on the region or language of the browser, it is recommended to use alternative links: on each page, you need to indicate information about its alternative versions. You can use markup not only for different languages ​​and countries but also for the regions of Russia – just apply the codes from the ISO 3166-2: RU list.

 

Dan Taylor
Dan Taylor is an experienced SEO consultant and has worked with brands and companies on optimizing for Russia (and Yandex) for a number of years. Winner of the inaugural 2018 TechSEO Boost competition, webmaster at HreflangChecker.com and Sloth.Cloud, and founder of RussianSearchNews.com.