The title and description are the substance of a snippet, and Yandex is explicit that their quality affects click-through rate. What it is less widely known for is where those two elements actually come from.
The sources
From the page:
- The
titleelement. - The
descriptionmeta tag. - The page text itself, including Schema.org markup.
From elsewhere:
- Yandex Market.
- The text of links to the page from other sites.
That last source deserves attention. Anchor text written by third parties can feed the description Yandex shows for your page. It cannot be edited, and on a page whose own text is thin it can dominate.
What is actually being chosen
Yandex assembles the description to be as informative and relevant to the specific query as possible. So one page has many descriptions, each generated for the query that produced it. This is why “our snippet is wrong” is usually not a bug: a different query would have produced a different snippet, and the tag is a candidate rather than an instruction.
How to influence it
Place a clear, specific title in the head; write a description that is unique, factual and different from the title; and — the part people forget — make sure the page body itself contains well-formed sentences stating the important facts, because the body is a source too. A page whose useful content is in bullet fragments and image captions gives Yandex nothing coherent to quote.
Measuring
Page statistics shows impressions, clicks and click-through per URL. High impressions with low click-through is the snippet failing, and it is fixable without touching position.
Comment nous l'appliquons
The source list is what we show clients who ask why they cannot control their snippet: the body text and third-party anchor text are inputs too, and Yandex composes per query. The practical consequence is that improving the first paragraph of a page often improves the snippet more than rewriting the meta description does — and a page with no quotable prose has no good snippet available to it.
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