Differences between high-quality and low-quality websites

This is Yandex’s statement of what it is optimising for, written as two lists: what a good site looks like and what a restricted one looks like. It sits behind every specific violation, and it opens with a warning worth quoting — if a method of artificially influencing ranking is not listed, that does not mean it is allowed.

Markers of a good site

• Original content and genuine service, rather than aggressive marketing.
• Built for people, not for algorithms: the site should stand on its own as a resource rather than existing to harvest search traffic.
• Links chosen because they add value to the reader — not added because somebody asked.
• Clean, thoughtful design with navigation that helps people find things quickly.
• Honesty about what the site is: no targeting of queries the site cannot actually answer, so visitors get what they expected.

Markers of a restricted site

Yandex groups these into four families.

• Thin and unoriginal content — copying, low-quality machine or AI translation, no original material; auto-generated content; catalogue sites that aggregate without adding descriptions or a service; internal search-result and filter pages that are numerous and uninformative (Yandex notes these also load the server and waste crawl capacity that valuable pages need); affiliate pages adding nothing to what the merchant already publishes.
• Redirect and traffic manipulation — doorways redirecting users without consent; groups of sites owned by the same company selling the same thing in order to occupy several results at once; behaviour simulation; cloaking; external links placed to deceive the search engine rather than to recommend; keyword lists and padding.
• Display and engagement tactics — invisible or barely visible text and links; sites whose main purpose is aggressive attention-grabbing through pop-ups, pop-unders and click-unders.
• Unethical practice, fraud and malware — downloads that install something else or masquerade as a known application; harmful CMS or server configurations, infected affiliate programs, mobile redirects that hijack the click from search results; and organisations behaving unethically toward customers according to Yandex data and user reports.

The clause with the widest reach

The multi-site clause deserves attention because the tactic is common and rarely thought of as spam: several domains, one owner, same products, built to occupy more of the first page. Yandex states the rationale plainly — users want a range of options to choose from — which means the practice is treated as manipulation regardless of how genuinely each site is built.

How to use this page

As the test for anything you are unsure about. If a tactic only makes sense on the assumption that the search engine will not notice, it fails the good-site list, and the absence of a specific rule against it is not a defence.