Recommendations

Recommendations are the second list under Site diagnostics: things that are not breaking the site but are costing it visibility. Unlike errors, none of them will remove pages from search. Most of them take an hour and are never done.

The recurring entries

• Subdomains found in search results. Raised once, when a subdomain that is not in the console appears in Yandex. This is how staging environments and forgotten campaign hosts announce themselves. Either add the subdomain and verify it (simplified verification is available if you already own the parent domain) or remove it from search deliberately.
• Site region is not set. In Yandex this is not cosmetic. Location-dependent queries are answered with regionally assigned sites; a business serving Moscow that has declared no region competes for those queries at a structural disadvantage.
• Favicon missing or unreachable. The site appears in results without an icon. When the file exists but is not downloadable, the cause is one of three: a response code other than 200 OK, a redirect on the file URL, or a type attribute that does not match the actual file format.
• Not optimised for mobile devices. Comes with the list of failing pages and links to the mobile compatibility audit tool.
• robots.txt not found, or errors in robots.txt. The consequences run both ways — important pages disappearing from search, and pages that should never have been indexed appearing in it.
• No sitemap in use, or sitemap errors. After adding a file, allow up to two weeks for the robot to process it before expecting the warning to clear. An “unknown tag” error is informational: Yandex ignores unsupported elements and processes the rest, so the file does not need rewriting.
• Incorrect handling of missing pages. The site does not return 404 for URLs that do not exist — the classic soft-404, where every mistyped address returns a page and a 200.

How to work the list

Recommendations are a menu, not a queue. The ones that pay are the ones tied to how the site is actually found: region, mobile, sitemap, 404 handling. Favicon is a five-minute job that improves how the result looks. Subdomain notices deserve a decision rather than a fix.

Confirming a fix

The diagnostics page reflects the state on the date of the last check, not the current state of the site. After changing something, click the confirmation button again and wait for the next crawl; for mobile issues, re-run the page through Tools → Audit pages for mobile compatibility first, so you are not claiming a fix the robot will disagree with.