FAQ about hCard

How is the marked up data processed? How soon is it displayed in Yandex.Business?

The data is extracted from the organization's card when the Yandex search robot is indexing your site. Sites are crawled at different speeds. It usually depends on how often the site is updated.

Add pages with marked up contact information to the sitemap file to inform the robot that these pages are important.

Before being added to Yandex.Business, the data received from the card is reviewed by a moderator. The review takes up to 2 weeks.

How else can I add data to Yandex.Business?

Apart from hCard markup, you can use the public Yandex.Business form or add data on the Region page in Yandex.Webmaster. The latter way is better for the site owner, since it allows you to track the request processing and check out the error information.

You can use whichever way you prefer.

What is the difference between using hCard and the Yandex.Webmaster service?

With hCard, you communicate your contact information not only to Yandex, but to the whole world. Address markup is a good practice in site creation. You do it irrespective of your cooperation with Yandex and without registering in Yandex.Webmaster. If the address or the phone changes, you just need to update the information on your site.

Using Yandex.Webmaster to add and edit contact information has several advantages. The information in Yandex.Business is updated faster and you can track the moderation process.

Information from the hCard markup and from Yandex.Webmaster is added to a single database. That's why you can view and edit the data added in hCard in Yandex.Webmaster.

When should I use hCard?

The hCard markup is helpful when you create a new website. The website gets added to both the search index and Yandex.Business automatically.

You may also prefer the hCard markup if your organization has an extensive branch network and the addresses changes relatively often. When the contact information on your website changes, it also changes automatically in Yandex.Business. You don't have to do anything to keep it up to date.

Does Yandex process personal data marked up with hCard?

No, currently Yandex processes organization cards.

How safe is using semantic markup?

hCard is a fully open format. This means that you can't control which services extract the data and how they use it. However, any publicly available information may be used by hackers. Semantic markup just facilitates extracting data from the page body. Avoiding it doesn't guarantee security.

In any case, it is up to you which microformats to use and which data exactly to mark up.

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

The markup is created within two weeks. If Yandex doesn't support any of the markup types on the page or the markup is incorrect, it skips it.

The Yandex robot will be able to index the site information even without markup, and it doesn't affect displaying pages in the search results. To set the desired page description in the search results, use the Description meta tag.

For a detailed description of errors, see Structured data validator.

This feedback form is intended for questions about Yandex partner programs and markup. If you are in doubt whether you should use a particular partner program provided by other services (not Yandex), we can't comment on how it influences your site's state in the search.