Favicon

The favicon appears in the snippet, in results, in the browser address bar and in bookmarks. It is the smallest piece of brand presence in search and one of the few visual elements a site fully controls.

Format and size

120 × 120, 32 × 32 or 16 × 16 pixels. Formats: SVG (recommended), ICO, GIF, JPEG, PNG or BMP. No animation. Yandex recommends 120 × 120 or SVG so the logo stays clear in its services.

Installation

Place the file in the site root and reference it in the head of the home page:

<link rel="icon" href="https://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

rel accepts icon or shortcut icon. type must match the format — image/svg+xml, image/x-icon, image/png and so on. Cyrillic URLs must be given in Punycode. If several favicon links are present, the robot may pick any of them, which is the usual reason a site displays an icon nobody recognises.

Verifying it

• The file must be reachable directly, returning 200 OK.
• It must not be blocked in robots.txt — check the directory as well as the file.
• Site diagnostics reports three specific errors: a status other than 200, a redirect on the file URL, and an incorrect type value.
• The full check list in site diagnostics shows “Everything is OK” once the robot has processed the file.

Timing, and the fast route

Once downloaded, it appears in results within two weeks. To change or remove it, update or delete the file — again two weeks. But submitting the home page for reindexing cuts that to about three days, which is the single most useful fact on this page.

Two things worth knowing

• Yandex may take the icon from an apple-touch-icon tag as well.
• If the robot cannot reach the site during indexing, results may show the hosting provider’s favicon — the parking-page icon. That explains an otherwise inexplicable wrong icon.

Choose an image that reads well in both light and dark themes; background may be transparent or solid.