Main address and secondary mirror

Main and secondary are different site addresses that have the same content. To avoid duplicate information from such sites in the search results, Yandex groups them as follows:

main site address — the one included in search results;
secondary mirror — the one not included in search results.

During merging, some accumulated metrics are assigned to the main site address. For example, external links of the old site will be recognized as external links of the new one. At the same time, the External links page in Yandex Webmaster displays the URLs specified on a third-party site.

You can tell the robot which site should be considered the main mirror. If there are no instructions, the robot will use special algorithms to determine the main address.

Site representation	Example	Will the sites be grouped
The site is accessible at URLs with and without the "www" prefix	`www.example.com` and `example.com`
The site is available over HTTP and HTTPS	`http://example.com` and `https://example.com`
The site is located in different domain zones	`example.com` and `example.ru`	—
Identical content is displayed in different domains	`example.com` and `other-example.ru`	—

Learn more

Contact support

When you change a site’s main address or the secondary mirror, it usually takes about a month for the changes to appear in the search results. If you followed the instructions when moving or separating sites, but the changes didn't appear in the search results, contact support.

Tell us what your question is about so we can direct you to the right specialist:

The main address of the site was changed by mistake

The main mirror of the site may change if a redirect or the rel="canonical" attribute pointing to the site that became the main mirror is set on the old site pages. To avoid automatic selection of the main site address in the future, make sure that pages of all secondary mirrors redirect to the corresponding pages of the desired main address.

The site is presented in the search results with the wrong URL

This means that the indexing bot has selected the main site address automatically. Specify the correct site URL for the robot, following the recommendations in the Moving a site to a new domain name section.

Site domain name changed

HTTP / HTTPS changed

The www prefix added or removed

The moving request isn't accepted

Main reasons why sites are not grouped:

In the source code of the site that should become the main mirror contains the attribute rel="canonical". Delete it and submit the request for moving again.
The site is unavailable or responds with a long delay.
The sites' content doesn't match. Check if the internal page URLs and headers match.
The site moves to another domain zone without a redirect.
Site indexing is prohibited in the robots.txt file.
Violations of the Search rules are detected on the site. View the details on the Security and violations page in Yandex Webmaster and fix the errors. In two weeks, check that the message about the violation disappears from Yandex Webmaster, and re-send the request.
The request was sent from the site to move to.
Internal service error. Try sending the request later.

Recommendations didn't help

Sites take a long time to separate

You can also go to

Was the article helpful?

Indexing office documents and Flash files

Whether the site is a mirror of another site