Searchable pages is the report that answers the question clients actually ask: how many of our pages are in Yandex, and why are the rest not? It covers pages included, pages excluded, the reason for each exclusion, and — unusually — the source through which each page reached the index. History runs from 12 October 2016.
Four views of the same data
- Added and removed — the ratio of inclusions to exclusions.
- Excluded — exclusion trend over time.
- History — inclusion trend, segmented by site section.
- Distribution — a pie chart of pages in search by section. The total in search can exceed the chart total, because only pages and sections listed on the Site structure page are counted there.
Changes over the last three months are listed with the index update date, the URL (green for added, blue for removed) and the reason for removal. Up to 50,000 changes, and up to 50,000 pages in the full list.
The discovery source — a genuinely Yandex feature
For each page, the console records how Yandex learned about it:
- Ordinary crawling — following links or a sitemap.
- The Yandex Metrica tag on the site.
- The IndexNow protocol.
This turns discovery from guesswork into measurement. If pages are entering the index only through Metrica, internal linking and the sitemap are not doing their job; if IndexNow submissions are not appearing as a source, the integration is not working regardless of what it reports at the other end. Source information updates independently of the index status itself.
The reassurance worth quoting
Yandex states plainly that the presence and number of excluded pages do not affect the site’s position. Excluded pages are a diagnostic, not a penalty — which matters, because a large site with faceted navigation will always have thousands of them, and clients read the number as damage.
When an excluded page finally disappears
Two conditions must both hold: the page returns 404 or carries a 301 redirect, and no other resource links to it. That second condition is outside your control, which is why old URLs linger in the list indefinitely.
Reading a sudden change
A sharp move in either direction almost always traces to something on the site — a structural change, a template change, or an edit to robots.txt — rather than to an algorithm update. Check the change date against your own deployment log before looking further.
How we apply this
The column we use that clients have never looked at is the discovery source. On more than one site, pages were reaching the index only through the Metrica tag, which meant internal linking and the sitemap were both effectively dead and nobody knew. We also make a point of explaining the excluded-pages count early in an engagement, because otherwise it becomes the number everyone watches, and Yandex says outright that it does not affect ranking.
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