What is Yandex Islands?

Yandex Islands is a new platform from the Yandex Company. Officially, Yandex Islands were launched in July; they present a new type of snippets in the search results. From now on Yandex wants to give interactive answers to users search queries (official information about Yandex Islands you can find here: http://beta.yandex.com ).

Long time before Yandex started adding elements to the search results in order to help the user estimate the website relevance. It ended up with idea to show to the user website functionality right into the search results. This way the search engine decreases the number of actions users have to perform to receive the answer to what interests them.

Yandex says its islands will be able to find solutions for complicated search tasks. For example, the user fills in the form to call a taxi, he writes Place of departure and Place of arrival, then Yandex sends request to the website and receives the information about costs and time for this particular case or as in an example below where we searched for the cinema:

In short, with the help of Yandex Islands users can order, buy a product, make an appointment or perform many other types of actions without leaving search results page.

While appearance of Yandex Islands is beneficial for the search engine users, it also brings challenges to the webmasters and website owners. Firstly, interactive snippets require much more space in the search results than simple snippets currently take. It means that less websites will be visible on one page and competition for the space in the search results will become fiercer.

Secondly, if you dont want your website to lose to your competitors and what it to have the most beneficial look in Yandex Islands, you will need to write special markup for website correct display in interactive search results.

Go here to read the rest:

Yandex Islands: Markup Issues and Implementation by @promodo_en