Terms and definitions

Half the confusion in Yandex work comes from assuming a familiar word means the familiar thing. The glossary is short and worth reading once, because three of its terms have no Google equivalent at all.

The terms that mean something different here

• Sitelinks — internal links shown inside the snippet. Generated automatically, but viewable and partly editable in the console, which is not true elsewhere.
• Location-dependent query — a query tied to a region, such as “taxi” or “buy iphone”. This is the concept behind regional assignment, and it is why declaring a region changes which queries a site is eligible for rather than merely how well it does on them.
• Visited page — a page the robot accessed. Crucially, this includes pages that returned an error, so the count measures attention, not success.
• Excluded page — a page the robot reached but did not include in search.

The ordinary ones

External link — on another site. Internal link — between pages of one site, and note that Yandex counts different directories and subdomains as internal. Duplicate page — same content, different URL, same site. Widget — a graphic module showing brief site statistics.

Why the vocabulary matters commercially

The word that causes the most expensive misunderstanding is not in this list but sits behind it: mirror, Yandex’s grouping of alternate site addresses. Teams reading “duplicate” and “mirror” as synonyms spend weeks editing canonical tags when the mechanism is a different one entirely.

How we use it

As a twenty-minute conversation at the start of any Yandex engagement with a client’s in-house team. It prevents the recurring meeting where both sides use the same word for two different mechanisms and agree on a plan neither of them meant.