Site structure shows Yandex’s own view of how the site is organised, built from URL paths. It lists sections containing at least 10 pages that also make up more than 1% of the pages loaded into the search database, with crawled and in-search counts for each.
What the two counts mean
- Loaded — pages the robot accessed. This includes pages that returned errors, so it is a measure of attention, not of success.
- Pages in search — pages actually included in results.
The ratio between them, read per section rather than for the site as a whole, is the most useful number on the page. One section converting at 90% and another at 10% localises a problem immediately, and the second section is where the audit should start.
Sections you do not recognise
Yandex answers this directly: if a section appears that does not exist on your site, links to it probably exist on other sites. The robot is following them. If those URLs should not be crawled, block the section with Disallow. This is also how forgotten legacy paths and injected spam directories surface — a section nobody built is worth investigating before it is blocked.
Adding a section manually
Sections below the display thresholds can be added by hand with Add section, specifying a path beginning with /. Wildcards work: catalog1* matches paths starting with it, *catalog1 those ending with it, and *catalog1* those containing it. Changes take a few days to appear. This matters for a small but commercially important section — a services directory of forty pages on a catalogue of fifty thousand will never cross the 1% threshold on its own, and is exactly the section a client cares about.
Blocking a section
User-agent: Yandex
Disallow: /section/The robot applies this at the next crawl and removes the section.
Where else this view is used
The section list feeds the filters in crawl statistics and searchable pages, so a manually added section pays for itself immediately: every other indexing report becomes filterable by the part of the site you actually care about.
Comment nous l'appliquons
The first thing we do on a large site is add the commercially important sections by hand, because the 1% threshold hides exactly the parts a client asks about — the services pages under a huge product catalogue. After that, the loaded-versus-in-search ratio per section is the fastest indexing diagnostic in the console: it turns “some of our pages are missing” into “this template is failing”, usually within ten minutes.
Services associés