How do I improve the site’s ranking in the search?

Yandex answers “how do I rank better?” with five indicators to work on and, more usefully, a list of reasons rankings move that have nothing to do with anything you did.

The five indicators

• Quality — the good-site/bad-site criteria, no violations, and the quality of the services the organisation actually provides. Yandex notes that it may take additional signals about the company’s integrity into account.
• Security — no threats detected.
• Convenience — the site-building recommendations, a mobile version, and a region assigned.
• Usefulness — measured through Metrica, identifying weak pages by how visitors behave.
• Representation in results — snippets, organisation data, sitelinks.

Why rankings change without you

This is the part worth having ready when a client calls:

• Algorithms changed — they are updated continuously.
• The search database updated — site characteristics, popularity data, machine-learning models and ranking factors all refresh.
• Other sites improved. Your position can fall because competitors got better, with nothing wrong on your side.
• The site URL changed — expect a drop as old pages leave the index.
• Pages left search — check with the url operator and the exclusion reasons.
• Anything on the site changed — structure, URLs, or the content that matched the query.
• User interests changed.

Yandex’s own escalation threshold

Support is worth contacting only when all of these hold: the site led for a long time, the ranking dropped by more than 30 positions, and traffic decreased. Below that, Yandex says fluctuation is normal and points at algorithm adjustment and personalisation.

The check before panicking

Compare your query statistics against Wordstat history. If impressions for those queries fell across the market, demand moved and the site did not. And remember results are personalised: the position you see as a frequent visitor to your own site is not the position anyone else sees.