Signs of a low-quality site

What is a good site and a low-quality site, according to Yandex?

Yandex strives to find the answer to a user's query by providing information and links to online information on the search results page. The decisions we've made about creating and developing the search engine are based on our understanding of what users need and what kind of information is valuable.

Follow the recommendations below to have your site indexed and ranked better. Any deceptive techniques may result in your site being downgraded or even removed from search results partially or entirely.

What to focus on

• Create sites with original content or services. Advertising is not what users are looking for when they go to a site.

• Think about your users, and not just about search engines. Would you have created the site, or a page or element on it, if search engines didn't exist? Do users visit your site or online store from sources other than search engines?

• Only add links that are useful and interesting for your site visitors. Don't link to something just because someone asked you to.

• Make sure that your site's design makes it easy for users to access its main content.

• Be honest. Attracting users with search terms that aren't fully relevant to your site is not the same as acquiring an audience. Think about what a user will get from visiting your site.

Examples of these principles

If this section doesn't cover some method for artificially influencing Yandex site rankings, it doesn't mean we approve of it. Use common sense and follow the principles described above.

We avoid indexing or giving high rankings to:

• Sites that mislead users, such as downloading another program when a user downloads a file (audio, video, torrent, and so on). Or sites that offer some software disguised as a popular application. An example of such a violation is using so-called wrappers.

• Sites that use visitors' devices for cryptocurrency mining.

• Sites that publish SEO links on other sites.

• Sites that copy or rewrite information from other resources and don't create original content.

• Sites that copy or rewrite information from other resources, with low-quality automatic translation, and don't create original content.

• Pages and sites created to redirect the visitor to another resource, either automatically (“redirect”) or not.

• Auto-generated (meaningless) text.

• Sites with directories (of articles, software, businesses, and so on), if they are just content aggregators and don't create their own texts and descriptions or provide a unique service.

• Pages with invisible or poorly visible text or links.

• Sites that return differing content to the visitors and the search engine robots (“cloaking”),

• Sites that offer products or information through affiliate programs, but do not present any value for the visitor.

• Sites that use cheating techniques (for example, malware, CMS settings and server configurations that pose a risk to the users, viruses in affiliate programs and malicious mobile redirects), as well as sites that redirect users to third-party resources or change the search results window to pages on other resources when the user clicks the link in the search engine.

• Sites that attempt to influence the search engine by imitating user actions.

• Sites that aim to aggressively display advertising materials (including pop-ups, pop-unders, and click-unders).

• Sites that contain lists of search queries (multiple repetitions and lists of keywords) intended solely for tricking search engines and manipulating their results, including the use of page elements that hide keywords by scrolling or other techniques.

• Groups of sites belonging to the same owner or company that offer visitors the same products or services, created for the purpose of getting multiple positions in search results and accumulating traffic.

• Unmoderated forums and bulletin boards that contain a large amount of link spam.

• Sites that include external links exclusively for deceiving search engines and “inflating” relevancy, when these links are not actually the author's recommendation to visit a resource.

• Sites or groups of sites that intensively link to each other (“link farms”).

• Websites that belong to organizations and are known to perform unfair actions towards customers (according to reports from Yandex services and users).

• Pages with site search results or results of selecting products, services, or other items by condition, if they are not very informative and not useful for users. Often there are many such pages. This can increase the load on your site and reduce the speed at which the indexing bot crawls useful pages.