Signs of a low-quality site

What to focus on

• Create websites with original content or services. Advertising is not what users are looking for when they visit a website.

• Think about your users, and not just about search engines. Would you have created the website, web page, or an element on it if search engines didn't exist? Do users visit your website or online store from sources other than search engines?

• Only add links that are useful and interesting for your website visitors. Don't link to something just because someone asked you to.

• Design the website carefully. It should help the visitors see the main information the website was created for.

• Be honest. Attracting users with search terms that aren't fully relevant to your website is not the same as acquiring an audience. Think about what a user will get from visiting your site.

Examples of these principles

If this section doesn't cover some method for artificially influencing Yandex site rankings, it doesn't mean we approve of it. Use common sense and follow the principles described above.

We avoid indexing or giving high rankings to:

• Sites that mislead users, such as downloading another program when a user downloads a file (audio, video, torrent, and so on). Or the website offers some software disguised as a popular app, and so on. An example of such violations are called wrappers.
• Sites that use visitors' devices for cryptocurrency mining.
• Sites that publish SEO links on other sites.

• Sites that copy or rewrite information from other resources and don't create original content.

• Sites that copy or rewrite information from other resources, with low-quality automatic translation, and don't create original content.
• Pages and sites created to redirect the visitor to another resource, either automatically (“redirect”) or not.

• Auto-generated (meaningless) text.

• Websites with directories (of articles, software, businesses, and so on), if they are just content aggregators and don't create their own texts and descriptions or provide a unique service.

• Pages with invisible or poorly visible text or links.

• Sites that return differing content to the visitors and the search engine robots (“cloaking”).

• Sites that offer products or information through affiliate programs, but do not present any value for the visitor.

• Sites that use cheating techniques (for example, malware, CMS settings and server configurations that pose a risk to the users, viruses in affiliate programs and malicious mobile redirects), as well as sites that redirect visitors to third-party resources or change the search results window to pages on other resources when the user clicks the link in the search engine.

• Sites that attempt to influence the search engine by imitating the visitor's actions.

• Sites that aim to aggressively display advertising materials (including popups, popunders, and clickunders).

• Sites that contain lists of search queries (multiple repetitions and lists of keywords) intended solely for tricking search engines and manipulating their results, including the use of page elements that hide keywords by scrolling or other techniques.

• Groups of sites belonging to the same owner or company that offer visitors the same products or services, created for the purpose of getting multiple positions in search results and accumulating traffic.

• Unmoderated forums and bulletin boards that contain a large amount of link spam.

• Sites that include external links exclusively for deceiving search engines and “inflating” relevancy, when these links are not actually the author's recommendation to visit a resource.

• Sites or groups of sites that intensively link to each other (“link farms”).

• Websites that belong to organizations and are known to perform unfair actions towards customers (according to reports from Yandex services and users).
• Site pages with search results.

Various restrictions are applied according to these principles, including: