Reindex pages

Reindex pages is how you tell Yandex that specific URLs are new or changed, instead of waiting for the robot’s own schedule. There is a daily quota shared across the primary domain and all subdomains, and it resets each day.

The three statuses

• In queue — the robot will visit these URLs first on its next crawl. Usually less than three days.
• Request processed — the robot visited the page; data updates within two weeks. Read this carefully: it does not mean the page was indexed. A page blocked from indexing reaches this status and never appears in search.
• Error — the robot could not index the page or update its record. Check accessibility and response speed, then resubmit.

What not to submit

• robots.txt — re-crawled automatically within hours.
• favicon.ico — submit the home page instead.
• Sitemap files and XML feeds, including product feeds — these belong in Indexing → Sitemap files.

The tool is for HTML pages, PDFs, Microsoft Office and OpenOffice documents, and text files. Submitting anything else is not guaranteed to do anything.

For large volumes

The daily quota makes this a tool for individual URLs. Sites that need to submit many pages regularly should use the Metrica tag crawl instead, which Yandex names explicitly as the alternative.

The four situations it does not solve

Yandex’s own troubleshooting is worth internalising, because it describes what people actually expect this tool to fix:

• Content changed but search shows the old version. Check that the robot can reach the page, that it is in the sitemap, and that prohibiting directives cover only technical and duplicate pages.
• Pages blocked in robots.txt are still in search. Allow two weeks after the robot’s next crawl before treating it as a fault.
• Old pages redirect but are still listed. The robot follows redirects gradually; submitting for reindexing speeds it up. If the domain itself changed, expect more than a month.
• Nothing appears after three weeks. That is the point at which it is worth contacting support rather than resubmitting.

Working habit

Submit after fixing something, then add the URL to important page monitoring so the status change arrives as a notification rather than requiring you to keep checking.