Yandex accepts three mobile approaches — adaptive design at one URL, dynamic serving from the same URL, and a separate mobile subdomain — and treats them differently in one important respect.
How Yandex links a mobile subdomain to its desktop site
The mobile robot checks the desktop page, follows the redirect to the mobile one, and if that passes, the desktop URL is considered mobile-friendly. For this to work the mobile subdomain’s structure must fully match the main domain’s.
The consequence of failure is spelled out, and it is severe: if the versions are not linked, both are indexed and both can appear in mobile results. The audience splits between them, and so do the signals that determine search standing. Yandex says outright that without reliable data on the connection, it cannot combine those signals — which is the strongest argument in its documentation for responsive design over a separate mobile site.
The requirements common to all three approaches
- Everything must be reachable by YandexMobileBot/3.0, and
robots.txtmust allow the CSS and JavaScript responsible for mobile rendering — otherwise pages are judged on a broken rendering. - Pages must return
200 OK. - No Flash, Silverlight or Java applets on mobile pages. HTML5 instead, or remove heavy interactive elements.
- Content fits horizontally, no horizontal scrolling at 320 pixels or wider, and text at a size that can be read comfortably.
A naming trap worth avoiding
Yandex warns that addresses like m.example.com may surface in desktop results as accidental mobile links, and recommends less ambiguous subdomain names for regional desktop variants — mos.example.com for a Moscow version rather than something that reads as “mobile”.
Checking
Single pages through Tools → Audit pages for mobile compatibility, which takes minutes. The whole site through the site diagnostics recommendation, which takes up to two weeks. Note that the site-wide check is not offered for an alternate address — another reason to know which of your addresses is primary.
Cómo lo aplicamos
The blocked-CSS case is the one we find most often on inherited sites: robots.txt disallows an assets directory, the mobile robot renders the page without styles, and the site is judged not mobile-friendly while looking perfect on a phone. For clients still running a separate m. subdomain, the signal-splitting passage is the argument that finally justifies the move to responsive — it comes from Yandex, not from us.
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