Help for webmasters
Yandex is the search engine that decides how visible a site is in Russia, across the CIS, and in the…
Working with Yandex Webmaster
Yandex Webmaster exists to answer one question — how easily can users find your site — and it does so…
Working with Yandex WebmasterNew features of the service
The change log is the fastest way to learn that a tool you rely on now behaves differently, or that…
Working with Yandex WebmasterGetting started
Connecting a site to Yandex Webmaster takes four steps and about ten minutes, but three of those steps contain a…
Access rightsVerifying the site rights
Indexing data can expose things a site owner would not publish — internal URLs, staging paths, pages excluded for reasons…
Access rightsManaging access rights
Once a site is verified, access can be handed to other people through named roles instead of shared passwords. Only…
Working with Yandex WebmasterMy sites
My sites is the portfolio screen: every site on the account with its headline numbers side by side. It is…
Working with Yandex WebmasterNotifications
Yandex Webmaster will tell you when something about your site changes in search — but only for the topics you…
Working with Yandex WebmasterSite diagnostics
Yandex checks every verified site daily and sorts what it finds into two lists: errors, which are problems affecting availability…
Site diagnosticsErrors
The errors list is where Yandex reports problems that either remove pages from search or degrade indexing. Checks run daily.…
Site diagnosticsRecommendations
Recommendations are the second list under Site diagnostics: things that are not breaking the site but are costing it visibility.…
RecommendationsProblems with optimization for mobile devices
Yandex judges mobile optimisation at site level, not page level, and it does so with a separate mobile robot. The…
Working with Yandex WebmasterSite security and violations
Yandex applies restrictions when its algorithms judge that a site breaks the search rules or uses fraudulent promotion. This is…
Site security and violationsUse of SEO texts
An SEO text, in Yandex’s definition, is text written for the indexing bot rather than the reader. The violation is…
Unexpected redirects
Unexpected redirection is search spam in which the visitor ends up on a third-party site they did not choose to…
Site security and violationsMimicry
Mimicry is a site copying the appearance or function of a well-known or official resource — a company, a government…
Site security and violationsCloaking
Cloaking is showing different content to users than to indexing bots. Yandex’s definition is broader than the classic case and…
Site security and violationsUnwanted software
Yandex flags a site for unwanted software when it finds dangerous or unwanted programs — or links to them —…
Site security and violationsSocial engineering and deception
Social engineering is deception aimed at extracting money or sensitive data — card details, credentials, phone numbers — from ordinary…
Site security and violationsFraudulent activity
Fraudulent activity covers a site deliberately misleading users with false or distorted information that can cost them money or misrepresent…
Site security and violationsUseless content
Low-value content, in Yandex’s terms, is information that adds nothing for the reader and does not address their need. It…
Site security and violationsImitation of user actions
Imitation of user actions means artificially inflating a site’s search traffic to make it look popular and improve its ranking.…
Working with reviews
Yandex collects reviews about sites and about organisations, and surfaces both inside Yandex Webmaster on the Reviews and ratings page.…
Site qualityDifferences between high-quality and low-quality websites
This is Yandex’s statement of what it is optimising for, written as two lists: what a good site looks like…
How do I speed up my site?
Yandex treats loading speed as a quality indicator with a behavioural consequence: a user who does not wait goes elsewhere,…
Search query analytics
Query analytics is the layer that explains a traffic change instead of merely showing it. The data appears in two…
EfficiencyTraffic and product range analytics β
Traffic and product range analytics is a beta tool that compares your commercial coverage against the market rather than your…
EfficiencySearch query selection and market analysis β
Query selection and market analysis is a beta keyword tool built into the console, drawing on hundreds of millions of…
EfficiencySearch query monitoring
Query monitoring lists the queries for which your site already appears in Yandex — up to 150,000 per site, which…
EfficiencySearch query statistics
Query statistics tracks the site’s standing over time rather than query by query, and it can be sliced by region…
EfficiencyPage statistics in search results
Page statistics answers a different question from query statistics: not how a keyword performs, but how well an individual page…
EfficiencyManaging groups of queries
Query groups turn a flat list of thousands of queries into segments you can actually report on. It is the…
IndexingCrawl statistics
Crawl statistics is the log of what the robot actually did: which pages it fetched, when, and what the server…
IndexingSearchable pages
Searchable pages is the report that answers the question clients actually ask: how many of our pages are in Yandex,…
IndexingLow-value or low-demand pages
“Low-value or low-demand” is the exclusion reason that generates the most anxiety and the least action, because it sounds like…
IndexingWhy are pages excluded from the search?
Every excluded page carries a stated reason, listed under Indexing → Searchable pages → Excluded pages. Yandex is unusually forthcoming…
Site structure
Site structure shows Yandex’s own view of how the site is organised, built from URL paths. It lists sections containing…
IndexingStatistics for all site pages
The console’s on-screen reports are capped: 50,000 page changes under Indexing, and the first 3,000 queries over three months under…
Page check
Page check answers, for a single URL, what the robot receives and what Yandex has decided about it. It is…
IndexingConfigure GET parameters
GET parameters create the same content at many URLs — tracking tags, filters, session identifiers — and Yandex may treat…
IndexingImportant page monitoring
Important page monitoring is per-URL surveillance: pick the pages that matter commercially and Yandex reports what happens to them in…
IndexingReindex pages
Reindex pages is how you tell Yandex that specific URLs are new or changed, instead of waiting for the robot’s…
Sitemap files
A sitemap tells Yandex the site’s current structure. It can be declared in robots.txt or added on the Sitemap files…
IndexingCrawling pages using a Yandex Metrica tag
Yandex can discover pages through the Metrica analytics tag rather than only through links and sitemaps. There is no Google…
IndexingCrawl rate
Crawl rate is the number of requests per second the robot makes to your site. It is set automatically by…
Site move, alternate site addressesPrimary and alternate site addresses
Mirrors are the Yandex concept with no Google equivalent, and misunderstanding them causes more wasted work than anything else in…
Site move, alternate site addressesMoving a site to a new domain name
Moving to a new domain in Yandex means grouping the old and new addresses and making the new one primary.…
Site move, alternate site addressesMoving a website to an address with the www prefix and back
Yandex treats example.com and www.example.com as different websites — and, combined with protocol, one domain can present four distinct addresses.…
Site move, alternate site addressesSwitching a site to Https
Switching to HTTPS changes the site’s address as far as Yandex is concerned, so it follows the mirror procedure rather…
Site move, alternate site addressesHow do I leave the HTTP version of the site available?
When a site answers on both HTTP and HTTPS, Yandex will normally make the HTTPS address primary and show it…