Yandex’s usability section is short and its content is a warning: there is a dedicated algorithm that assesses how useful individual page elements are, and user-friendly sites are preferred in results.
What it names explicitly
The answer must not only be relevant but easy to view and work with. Users should reach the information they need without interference from excessive pop-ups or advertising, and without having to decode overcomplicated text. Yandex notes plainly that webmasters sometimes neglect users’ interests, and that this algorithm exists because of it.
Why this is stronger than it looks
Two things distinguish it from generic advice. First, it is an algorithm, not a guideline — the assessment is automated and continuous. Second, it operates at the level of page elements rather than the page as a whole, so a good page carrying an aggressive interstitial is judged on the interstitial.
Where sites actually fail
- Modal overlays that appear before the content has been read — newsletter prompts, discount wheels, consent dialogues that block rather than inform.
- Advertising density above the fold that pushes the answer below it.
- Sticky elements consuming a third of a small screen.
- Text written to fill space rather than to be read, which Yandex mentions alongside pop-ups in the same sentence.
The connection to the rest of Yandex ranking
Behavioural signals carry more weight here than in Google. A pop-up that costs a fraction of visitors their patience does not only irritate them; it feeds the statistics the ranking system reads. The usability algorithm and the behavioural signals compound rather than duplicate each other.
The test worth running
Open the site on a phone, from a search result, with no cookies, and count how many actions stand between arrival and the answer. Anything above zero is a candidate for removal. That single exercise finds more of what this algorithm penalises than any audit tool.
Biz bunu nasıl uyguluyoruz
We run the arrive-from-search-on-a-phone test at the start of every engagement and record it, because a recording ends the argument about whether the pop-up is acceptable far faster than a discussion does. Marketing teams see these overlays in isolation, on a desktop, having dismissed them a hundred times; the visitor sees three of them stacked on a small screen before reading a word.
İlgili hizmetler