Configuring the site display in the search results

A snippet is the block describing a page in search results — title, description, and sometimes additional information. Snippets are generated automatically; nothing on this page is a control panel. What you get is influence over the inputs.

The four things that can enrich a snippet

• The address snippet, drawn from Yandex Business. It appears only when the site is in the top 30, the registered URL is the home page, the address matches the one verified in the console (same protocol, same www treatment), and the contact details are complete. Changes are made in the Yandex Maps organisation card, not on the site, and take about a week.
• Sitelinks, generated from internal navigation and viewable in the console.
• The favicon. Correctly placed, it is indexed and appears within about two weeks.
• Structured data — Schema.org, Open Graph, JSON-LD and microformats, limited to the supported types.

The favicon problems, which are unusually specific

• Not appearing: allow about two weeks after correct placement.
• Disappeared: most likely the site or its hosting was unreachable when the favicon robot called, so it was not added in the latest update. Wait for the next cycle, roughly two weeks.
• Wrong or outdated: two named causes — different favicons at different addresses of the same site (with and without www, HTTP and HTTPS), or the site being temporarily unavailable so the robot took the hosting parking page’s favicon instead. That second one explains the mysterious case of a hosting provider’s logo appearing beside a client’s result.

How to work on snippets

Write the title and description for the result rather than for the page, keep the organisation card accurate, place a favicon correctly at every address variant, and mark up only the supported types. Then measure in page statistics: unchanged position with improved click-through is the result to look for.