FAQ about hCard

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, currently Yandex processes organization cards.

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.