Primary and alternate site addresses

Mirrors are the Yandex concept with no Google equivalent, and misunderstanding them causes more wasted work than anything else in this knowledge base. The same site can answer at several addresses — with and without www, over HTTP and HTTPS, on different domains. Yandex calls one of them the primary address and the rest alternate addresses.

What the distinction means

Only the primary address appears in search results and only it participates in ranking. Alternate addresses hold the same content and are excluded from results. Crucially, Yandex’s robots initially treat every address as a separate site; the grouping happens later, once the algorithms recognise the duplication.

Why it matters in practice

• Visibility. Once grouped, pages on alternate addresses drop out of results — expected behaviour, frequently reported as a disaster.
• Metrics transfer. On merging, some accumulated signals move to the primary address; external links to the old site count as links to the new one.
• Competition. Addresses that are not grouped — subdomains, different domains with the same content — compete with each other, and both lose.

Finding your primary address

If the site is not yet in the console, adding it will trigger a message when the address you entered is an alternate one, and the field will be replaced with the primary address Yandex has chosen. If the site is already added, the My sites list shows grouped addresses together, with the primary one opening the group. An address grouped with nothing is itself primary.

Three situations and their remedies

• Yandex’s choice is correct. Add that address, verify rights, and afterwards the alternate entries can be deleted from the console — deleting them does not affect rights on the primary address.
• You want a different address to be primary. Re-enter your preferred address, verify rights on both, then use the Relocate site tool. Editing redirects alone is not the procedure.
• The primary address is not yours. First check whether a redirect exists pointing at it, using the server response check. If not, add your address, verify it, and use the ungrouping procedure.

The setting to enable now

Notifications for primary address changes. A silent change of primary address looks exactly like a ranking collapse in every report, and the cause is invisible unless you are told.