Regionality in Yandex is an explicit site attribute, not something inferred from hosting or language. For location-dependent queries — Yandex’s example is someone in Moscow searching for car repairs — regionally assigned sites are the ones shown. This is one of the largest structural differences from Google, and it is set in a form.
Where a region comes from
- Yandex Webmaster — you state it, and can correct what other sources implied.
- Yandex Business — organisation data you published there.
- Yandex Catalog — no longer updated; since 26 March 2018 regions inherited from it appear under Webmaster on the site region page.
All three are moderated.
The reassurance that prevents a bad decision
Assigning a region does not exclude the site from results elsewhere. It can still be found by users in any region when its content is relevant. Teams frequently avoid setting a region for fear of narrowing their reach, and lose the location-dependent queries for nothing.
Which sites need one
- General-interest media — not needed. It is not detected automatically unless the site publishes a phone number or an address, and if one is assigned wrongly you can report it.
- Regional media, and any site selling goods or services — yes: put correct contact and region information on the site, then set the preferred region in the console.
Choosing the right one
- One address, one region — choose that city. A Moscow business genuinely serving the whole country may choose “Russia”, provided the site contains evidence of that coverage.
- Delivery across regions — choose the region covering all delivery areas, and list the cities served on the site.
- Offices in several regions — one site takes the covering region and must list every address; separate domains or subdomains take their own regions each.
Passing moderation
Contacts and delivery information prominently placed; the site reachable and rendering correctly; no viruses. The full address should include postal code and city dialling code, and must not exist only as an image.
The trap for multi-region sites
If your site serves different content by visitor IP, remember that the robot crawls from one region and will therefore see exactly one version — the rest is never indexed. Yandex’s recommendation is unambiguous: make all pages accessible to the robot regardless of the IP it arrives from.
How we apply this
Region assignment is the first thing we set for any client with a physical or regional market, because it changes which queries the site is eligible for rather than how well it competes on them. The failure we find most often is an address published only as an image in the footer — moderation rejects it and nobody understands why. The IP-based content warning is the other one worth acting on: we have audited sites where two thirds of the catalogue was never indexed because the robot only ever saw the Moscow version.
Related services