Errors

The errors list is where Yandex reports problems that either remove pages from search or degrade indexing. Checks run daily. Each entry names the cause and the fix; what follows is what the entries mean in practice and the order we work them in.

Home page returns an error

The most serious entry on the list, because Yandex treats the home page as the site’s availability signal. Three usual causes: a noindex directive left in the HTML, a redirect away from the home page, or the hosting security system blocking the Yandex bot. Check the response code in Indexing → Crawl statistics, then run the server response check. Pay attention to the Page content section: “missing page content” with a 200 OK status usually means the server is sending Content-length: 0, and the robot cannot index a page whose declared length is zero even though a browser renders it perfectly.

DNS error

The robot resolves the site’s IP address once a day. If it fails, the site is not indexed at all. The causes are mundane and severe in equal measure: misconfigured DNS records, a transient outage, or — the one that catches small businesses every year — an unrenewed domain. Fixes propagate into the console within a few days.

Site closed for indexing in robots.txt

The robot fetches robots.txt several times a day. A disallow directive freezes all information about the site. The subtle variant of this error is protocol-specific: the site answers on both HTTP and HTTPS, the console is registered against HTTP, and the file blocks both. The fix is not to edit the file in isolation — add the HTTPS address to the console, redirect HTTP to HTTPS, and submit a site migration request so Yandex moves the primary address deliberately.

Security problems or violations

This entry links to the specific violation found: SEO texts, unexpected redirection, mimicry, cloaking, unwanted software, social engineering, fraudulent actions, low-value content, or a user-behaviour simulator. These are site-wide judgements rather than page-level errors, and each has its own recovery path.

Slow server response

The robot records average response time while crawling. Pages taking more than three seconds are logged as an error and indexing is slowed accordingly. The list of offending pages is given in the message — which usually turns out to be a single slow template (search results, a filtered category, an uncached product page) rather than the site as a whole.

Working method

Group by cause rather than by URL: a hundred entries typically collapse into two or three template problems. Fix, verify with the server response check, submit for reindexing, then declare the fix in the console — in that order, because claiming a fix that has not landed costs a 30-day wait.