Site indexing

How do I check if a site is accessible to users and indexing robots?

Ask AI about this page

2 min read

Availability is the precondition for everything else. Yandex makes the consequence explicit: if the robot cannot reach the site because of a server error, the site may disappear from search results entirely — and for the same reason, visitors cannot reach it either.

The three checks

  • Site diagnostics (Website optimisation → Site diagnostics), with a summary widget on the dashboard. This is where availability problems are reported first.
  • Security and violations. Yandex connects security to availability directly: infected sites are typically blocked by antivirus software in the browser, and hosting providers often disable infected sites, making them unreachable for visitors and robots alike. A malware incident is an availability incident.
  • Page check (Tools → Check page), which is the most informative of the three because it shows three different things at once.

What page check actually gives you

  • A screenshot of the page as rendered on mobile and desktop, in the audit results tab.
  • The text available to the indexing bot, under “page version in the database → page content”. This is the definitive answer to “can the robot read this page”.
  • The response code, under technical information.

Yandex states the rule plainly: 200 OK means the page is accessible to bots and visitors; any other code means it is accessible to neither and cannot appear in search results.

How to use this

When a page is missing from search, check availability before anything else, and check it as the robot rather than in a browser. The screenshot and the stored page content together answer the two questions that matter — what it looks like, and what of it the engine can actually read — and the gap between them is where most surprises live.

Alien Road

How we apply this

The stored page content view is the one we point clients to when they insist a page is fine, because it shows the text the robot holds rather than the page they are looking at. On JavaScript-heavy sites the difference is dramatic. The security-equals-availability link is worth stating too: a malware flag is not only a ranking problem, it is often the reason the host has taken the site offline.

Related services

Share

© Copyright 2026 Alien Road. All rights reserved.