Processing redirects
What redirects are recognized by the Yandex robot?
What's the difference between in-host redirection and host-to-host redirection?
In-host redirection is a redirection within the same host (FQDN). Host-to-host redirection is redirection to a page residing on a different host.
Example of an in-host redirect:
a.ru/ -> a.ru/index.html
www.a.ru/index1.html -> www.a.ru/index2.html
Example of an inter-host redirect:
a.ru/index1.html -> www.a.ru/index2.html
a.ru/index1.html -> b.ru/index2.html
How does Yandex process in-house redirects?
If one page (source) has a redirect to another page (target) within the same host, the robot will index the content of the target, and the search results will display the link to the target.
The main page of the host is always displayed in the search results.
a.ru/ -> a.ru/innerpage
a.ru/innerpage -> a.ru/
How does Yandex process redirects for regional and language versions of sites?
If regional or language versions are implemented as subdomains and a redirect is configured for redirecting visitors, the subdomains are combined into a group of mirrors. When the robot visits the site, like the visitor, it can be redirected to one of the subdomains. Then it indexes the target page of the redirect. Thus, the site can be displayed differently in the search:
- Displaying the home and internal pages
-
If the redirect is configured for internal pages, the search results display the redirect target page with its content. If the redirect is configured for the site home page, the search results show the home page with the content of the target page.
For example, the search displays the home page https://example.com. If the robot is redirected to the page https://example.com/en, the home page is displayed with the English content. If it is redirected to https://example.com/ru, the home page is displayed with the Russian content.
- Selecting the page version to display
-
If the site uses a redirect based on the user's IP address, the robot's IP address may differ from the region's IP address. Therefore, any of the page versions can be displayed in the search results. As a result, the page content may not match what you'd like the user to see.
- Identify a robot that crawls your site, for example, by the User-agent line.
- Check what content the robot retrieves.
- Choose one of the options:
- Configure the redirect so that the Yandex robot retrieves the same content.
- Instead of a redirect, use the language or region toggle on the site. To do this, configure the server so that both versions respond with the HTTP code 200 OK. If the sites are already combined into a group of mirrors, configure the server the same way, and the sites will be separated in some time. To speed up this process, submit a request to separate sites.