Yandex recognises the standard 3xx codes: 301 and 308 as permanent, 302, 303 and 307 as temporary, and a refresh meta tag with a short delay as a temporary redirect.
In-host versus host-to-host
An in-host redirect stays on the same fully qualified domain name (a.ru/ → a.ru/index.html); a host-to-host redirect crosses to another host, including between a.ru and www.a.ru. The distinction is not academic — mirror handling applies to the second kind and not to the first.
How in-host redirects are indexed
The robot indexes the target’s content and shows the target link. With one exception, stated plainly: the main page of the host is always displayed in search results. So a home page redirecting to an inner page still appears as the home page, carrying the inner page’s content.
Regional and language subdomains — the important section
Where language or regional versions live on subdomains and visitors are redirected automatically, those subdomains are grouped, and the robot is redirected exactly as a visitor is. Two consequences follow:
- If the home page redirects, the home page is shown in results with the content of the redirect target — so
example.comcan appear with English or Russian content purely according to where the robot was sent. - With IP-based redirection, the robot’s IP determines which version it sees, and that is rarely the version you want indexed for a given audience.
Yandex’s remedy is unambiguous: identify the robot by its user agent, check what content it receives, and then either configure the redirect so the robot gets the intended version, or replace automatic redirection with a language or region switch, serving 200 OK on every version. If the versions were already grouped, this configuration eventually ungroups them, and an ungrouping request speeds it up.
Why a move request gets refused
Yandex lists the causes: a rel="canonical" in the source of the site that should become primary; the site unavailable or responding slowly; content that does not match, including internal URLs and headings; a move to another domain zone with no redirect; indexing blocked in robots.txt; violations detected on the site — which must be fixed, and the notice must disappear, before resubmitting; or the request being sent from the destination site rather than the source.
Timing
Address changes normally take about a month to appear in results.
How we apply this
The automatic language redirect is the single most damaging pattern we encounter on international sites: the robot arrives from one location, gets one version, and everything else effectively does not exist. Yandex’s answer — a visible language switch instead of an IP redirect, with every version answering 200 — is the same advice we give for Google, and here it is written down by the search engine itself, which makes the conversation with a client considerably shorter.
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