Yandex recommends analysing visitor behaviour with Metrica and, separately, with server logs — the second half of that recommendation is the one people skip, and it is where robot behaviour is visible at all.
What to watch
- Traffic sources. Not only where visitors come from but changes in the mix, which signal a problem with a source before totals move. New sources deserve their own behavioural analysis — a new audience may need different things from the site.
- Search queries entered by visitors, including on-site search, which shows what people expected to find and did not.
- Target pages and conversion. Yandex’s advice here is refreshingly plain: there are many books about conversion, and what matters is to keep experimenting and analysing the results. Change how important links look, guide the route, measure.
- Technical parameters — screen resolution, browser version, operating system. Sites frequently look quite different from what their owners expect on the combinations real visitors use.
Two operational recommendations
- Configure hosting availability notifications, including by SMS, in Metrica or the CMS. Availability is not only a visitor issue: an outage during a crawl removes pages from search and can ungroup mirrors.
- Account for slow connections. Where part of the audience is on poor bandwidth, minimise page weight — Yandex singles out multi-megabyte images used as design elements.
Why behaviour matters more here
Yandex weighs behavioural signals more heavily than Google does, and it maintains a violation category for simulating them. The legitimate version of the same logic is this page: make the site work, measure what people actually do, fix what stops them. The difference between that and the violation is entirely whether the sessions are real.
The log recommendation, taken seriously
Metrica shows what visitors did. Only the server log shows what the robot did — which pages it fetched, how often, what the server answered, and whether a filter turned it away. When indexing behaves inexplicably, that is the record that explains it.
Biz bunu nasıl uyguluyoruz
We ask for server log access on every technical engagement for exactly the reason this page implies: analytics cannot see the robot. Half the crawl problems we have diagnosed were visible in the logs and nowhere else — a rate limiter returning 429 to Yandex, or a bot filter serving it a challenge page. The slow-connection point is worth acting on for clients with regional audiences, where hero images sized for an office monitor decide whether the page is ever seen.
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