Site diagnostics

Yandex checks every verified site daily and sorts what it finds into two lists: errors, which are problems affecting availability or presence in search, and recommendations, which are opportunities. A third tab, manual checks, is a checklist you tick off yourself. All three live under Website optimisation → Site diagnostics.

How the loop actually works

1. The daily check finds something and it appears in the list, on the dashboard, on My sites, and in notifications if the topic is enabled.
2. You fix the cause on the site.
3. You click I’ve fixed everything next to the entry.
4. The robot re-crawls and, if the problem is genuinely gone, the entry disappears — typically after a couple of days, since the page updates on the next crawl rather than on save.

The 30-day penalty for claiming too early

This is the rule worth internalising: if you click I’ve fixed everything and the robot still finds the problem, the button is disabled for 30 days. A premature claim does not just fail — it locks the fastest recovery path for a month. Verify the fix from the robot’s point of view first, using the server response check on the exact affected URL, and only then declare it fixed.

Speeding up confirmation

Submit the changed pages through the reindexing tool; the robot re-crawls submitted pages within about two weeks, and the page-check tool confirms whether it has actually been back. Waiting passively for the next natural crawl on a large site can take considerably longer.

What diagnostics can and cannot see

Everything on these lists is what an automated check can observe: response codes, availability, directives, markup, response times, detected violations. A site can pass every check cleanly and still rank badly, because nothing here evaluates whether the page answers the query. Treat a clean diagnostics panel as the starting line — the site is technically legible to Yandex — not as evidence that the search work is done.

The manual checks tab

This is a list of settings and practices that the robot cannot verify from outside. Items that do not apply to the site can be ticked off and dismissed, which is worth doing: an honest list of five outstanding items is useful, and a list of forty containing thirty-five irrelevant ones gets ignored entirely.