External

The External links report lists broken links pointing at your site from elsewhere — accumulated value arriving at a closed door. The robot checks them regularly, and up to 200,000 can be shown for one site.

The reassurance

Yandex states it directly: a large number of these does not affect the site’s status in search, unless you are using techniques intended to deceive search engines. Nor do links from low-quality sites — Yandex says the ranking algorithms were designed to minimise the possibility of a site being influenced from outside. Negative-SEO anxiety has no basis here.

Reading the report

Sorted by SQI (site quality index) by default, so the most consequential sources appear first. Group by site finds the single resource sending the most broken links — usually one directory or partner with an outdated link pattern, fixable with one message.

The filtering syntax, which is genuinely powerful

Beyond “contains”, the URL filter accepts operators, combinable with AND/OR across multiple lines:

• * — any number of characters: /tariff/*
• @ — contains the string: @tariff
• ~ — regular expression: ~table|sofa|bed
• ! — negation: !/tariff/*, and combined forms !@ and !~

@, ! and ~ work only at the start of a line, and matching is case-insensitive. The same syntax appears in other console reports, so it is worth learning once.

What to do with the list

Redirect to the closest equivalent page where a person following the link would find what they expected. Ignore links from sources you would not want an association with. To have links removed, contact the site owner or its hosting provider — once removed, they disappear from the report automatically.

Two robot behaviours explained

The robot requesting non-existent pages or subdomains is following links it found elsewhere; those addresses should simply return 404. And a sudden rise in inbound links is just the robot noticing new pages that link to you.