Yandex Webmaster Tools
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Yandex Webmaster Tools is an official free web service by Yandex search engine, which allows website owners to track website performance in Yandex search. In addition, there are many utilities in the Yandex Webmaster Tools that can improve the visibility of the website in search. The first version of Yandex Webmaster Tools was released in 2007. Despite the similarity of many functions of Yandex Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console, these are two tools that were developed independently of each other.
How to access Yandex Webmaster Tools?
To access Yandex Webmaster Tools you need to register an account. All Yandex services, such as Yandex Webmaster Tools, Mail, Maps, Yandex Metric are tied to one account, just like Google. After registering an account, go to https://webmaster.yandex.com/ and add your first website.
How to add a website to Yandex Webmaster Tools?
The process of adding a website to Yandex Webmaster Tools consists of two simple steps and does not differ from the process of adding a site to the Google Search Console.
Add website to Yandex Webmaster Tools:
In the top panel, click the button with the plus icon, and in the form below specify the URL of your website:
After adding the website, you will need to verify it.
Verify the website in Yandex Webmaster Tools:
There are four ways how you can verify your website:
- Verification by adding a meta tag
- Verification by uploading an HTML file to the root folder of the site
- Verification by adding DNS record
- Verification using WHOIS - this is the worst option due to the popularity of Whois Privacy Protection.
Verification in Yandex Webmaster Tools using Meta Tag:
Copy the meta tag and add it to the <head> section of your website.
If your website works on WordPress, then the Yoast SEO plugin has a built-in field for verifying the website in Yandex Webmaster Tools. Open Yoast → General → Webmaster Tools tab, and paste the contents of the verification meta tag into the Yandex Webmaster Tools field.
After adding a meta tag to your website, click the “Check” button.
Verification in Yandex Webmaster Tools using an HTML file:
Download HTML file and upload it to the root folder of your website and click the “Check” button.
Verification in Yandex Webmaster Tools using DNS Record:
To use this verification method, you need to go to the DNS settings of your domain, and add TXT Record by specifying the data received in Yandex Webmaster Tools in the value field.
After adding DNS Record, click the “Check” button.
If the verification is successful, you can start using Yandex Webmaster Tools. Keep in mind that not all data will appear immediately, Yandex needs some time (usually a couple of days) to collect and display all the information.
Overview of Yandex Webmaster Tools:
Summary - is a dashboard, where you can see summary information about your website.
- Website problems
- Crawl statistics.
- Clicks in search results
- Site Quality Index (SQI) metric.
- Inbound links.
Yandex Webmaster Tools: Site quality.
This section contains information on site quality metrics assigned by Yandex.
Yandex Site Quality Index (SQI)
Yandex Site Quality Index is a metric of website popularity. The following parameters are involved in the calculation algorithm: site audience size, behavioral factors, domain authority, etc. This metric is updated regularly.
Yandex Webmaster Tools Badges
Badges are assigned to websites as they achieve certain goals. Badges are showing up in the search results, thereby positively influencing the CTR from SERP.
Currently there are 4 badges:
- Popular site - issued to sites with high traffic and a permanent audience
- Users' Choice - issued to sites with a high level of users engagement and audience loyalty
- Secure connection - issued if website is working through HTTPS protocol
- Turbo Pages - issued for use of Turbo Pages technology (some analogue of AMP technology)
Yandex Webmaster Tools: Troubleshooting
This section displays information about website's problems:
- Site Diagnostics - displays information about problems with indexing, on-page optimization problems. This section also provides recommendations how to improve the website.
- Security and Violations - Information about security issues and Yandex penalties
Yandex Webmaster Tools: Search Queries
This section provides information about search queries. Here you can see general statistics on clicks and impressions, as well as data on clicks and impressions for specific pages and sections of the website.
Trends:
The Trends section allows you to compare your site with other similar websites.
Recommended Queries
The section allows you to request additional keywords that your site can be optimized for.
Yandex Webmaster Tools: Indexing Section
This section contains indexing statistics, as well as tools to improve it.
Crawl Statistics
In this section, you can see Yandex Bot crawl statistics. The functionality is generally identical to the Crawl Stats section of the Legacy Tools Google Search Console.
Searchable Pages
Here you can see all the pages that have been indexed by Yandex. This section is almost identical to the Coverage section of the Google Search Console.
Site Structure
In this section you can see the structure of the site, as Yandex robot sees it. Pages are organized in URL clusters.
Check URL Status
Here you can check the status of the page, whether it is available for the Yandex bot, is it disallowed for indexing, etc. Submitted URLs can be marked as important and added to Important Pages Monitoring.
Important Pages Monitoring.
This is a very useful feature that allows you to add the most important pages of your website for continuous monitoring, and receive notifications if something goes wrong.
Re-index pages
Here you can request re-indexing of pages. This functionality is identical to the Request Indexing functionality in the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console, the only difference is that you can add the list of multiple URLs (Daily limit is 110 URLs.)
Sitemap Files
Section for adding Sitemap.xml files to speed up website indexing . Similar to the Sitemaps section of the Google Search Console.
Relocate Site
This section is needed when you decided to migrate website to another domain (or another version of the domain - WWW / non-WWW & HTTP / HTTPS). Similar to Change Address in the Google Search Console.
Crawl Rate Settings
Here you can configure the crawl rate for your site. The functionality is identical to the settings in Google's Search Console.
Yandex Webmaster Tools: Display in Search
This section shows how the site looks in the search results. You can see if the site is showing up in Special Results (similar to Featured Snippets on Google), as well as what data is displayed in the snippet (Badges, Sitelinks, Rating, Addresses, etc.).
Yandex Webmaster Tools: Links
This section contains information about the links: inbound and outbound. In the Internal links section you can see all your backlinks discovered by Yandex Bot, as well as broken backlinks.
Yandex Webmaster Tools: Site Information
In this section you can set a letter case for displaying your website name in the search results, set regional targeting, configure sitelinks.
Yandex Webmaster Tools: Additional Tools
- Robots.txt analyzer - allows you to check and validate your robots.txt file. Similar to Google's Robots.txt Tester Tool
- Sitemap.xml validator allows you to validate your sitemap.xml. You can upload xml file, specify URL or just paste contents of sitemap.xml file.
- Server Response Checker - allows you to check URLs' HTTP response codes for different Yandex's bots
- Remove pages from search - allows you to exclude pages or URL clusters from search results. Identical to Remove URLs tool in Google Search Console
- Audit pages for mobile compatibility - check if the page is displayed correctly on mobile devices.
- Structured data validator - allows you to check various types of structured markup. Validation is available for the following structured markups: microdata, schema.org, microformats, OpenGraph and RDF
In general, Yandex Webmaster Tools contains a large number of tools that can be useful even if you do not do SEO for Yandex. If you used Yandex Webmaster, please share your opinion in the Reviews section below.
Screenshots:
If you are working on SEO for Yandex this tool is a total must. Despite the fact that in many ways it is identical to Google Search Console I love Yandex's tool more. The interface looks much better for me. The number of features that do not exist in GSC makes this tool really great. But I don't think f you need it is you don't do SEO for Yandex.