Moving the site

A site move means changing the address Yandex ranks. Four situations count as one:

• A new domain name — example.com to sample.com.
• A new top-level domain — example.com to example.ru.
• Adding or removing www.
• Switching between HTTP and HTTPS.

In every case Yandex treats each address as a different site. Left alone, both can appear in search and compete with each other — the site’s own worst competitor.

The basic procedure

1. Add both addresses to the console and verify ownership of each.
2. Confirm the site is reachable at the new address.
3. Set up redirection from old to new.
4. Submit the move request under Indexing → Relocate site.

Yandex is explicit about what the fourth step buys: it speeds up the migration and identifies potential errors. The redirects do the work; the request makes it faster and tells you when something is wrong.

The automatic case

Where a site appears both with and without www, Yandex may choose the primary address itself, and only that one will appear in results. Convenient when it picks correctly, and the reason a site can “lose” its rankings overnight when it does not: nothing dropped, a different address started ranking.

What this page is for

It is the decision point. Which of the four situations applies determines which detailed procedure to follow, and they differ — the domain move requires page-to-page redirects and matching robots.txt files, while the www change additionally accepts rel="canonical" as an alternative to redirecting.

The expectation to set before starting

Address changes take about a month to settle, and Yandex guarantees nothing about preserved page count, ranking or traffic. A migration is a risk to be executed carefully, not a configuration change.