Yandex: Webmaster Tools Overview and Guidelines

Yandex: Webmaster Tools Overview and Guidelines

Agenda Introduction Register Features and Tools 2

Introduction

What is Yandex Yandex is the leading search engine in Russia. It has nearly 60% market share in Russia with a stronghold in Poland, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Turkey. Yandex is better for Russian language search. Yandex was created specifically for the Russian market and is better able to parse user intent over spelling in the Russian language. Yandex also offers searches in English which means you have a potential to extract traffic from Russia. 4

Yandex Algorithm MatrixNet is Russia s page priority algorithm (similar to PageRank). It measures site popularity and the sum and relevancy of backlinks to determine a thematic index citation (TIC) score which plays into MatrixNet. TIC is scored on a scale of 0-10,000 and is same for every page on the website so it is not page-by-page like PageRank. A plugin called Yandex Elements will allow you to see this score: - https://elements.yandex.com.tr/ 5

Register

Yandex Features without Registration You can submit your site to Yandex without having a Webmasters Tools account. Features that you can access without registration include: - Site Submission - Check your site is indexed by Yandex - Analyze your site s Robots.txt - Report spam search result and remove your URL from search - Validate your Sitemap, XML feed and Microformats However, registering your site and having Webmaster Tools can help derive deeper insights. 7

Yandex Webmaster Tools Account Registration Get your Yandex.Passport Account. Register with the following information: - First and Last Name (Surname) - Username - Account Password - Mobile Phone (reset passwords) - Alternate Email Address (reset passwords) - Security Question (reset passwords) If you have registered with a mobile number, Yandex will send you a SMS with a confirmation code which is required for completing the registration process.

Add your Website Once you are logged in, click Add Site link. Enter your site URL in the and click Add Site.

Yandex Webmaster Tools Account Registration You have 4 options for site verification: - HTML File Upload Download an HTMl file and then upload in your site s root directory - Meta Tag This is a simple and recommended method. Copy the HTML code and paste in your site s header section. Note, this has to be on all pages of your site - Txt File - Create an empty text file with the specified name provided by Yandex and upload it in your site s root directory - By DNS - Create a CNAME record as provided by Yandex in your site s DNS setting Once you have verified using one of these options, publish and click Check to see if Yandex can reach your site.

Features and Tools

Sitemap Submission Adding a Sitemap: - Navigate to Sitemap files tab under Indexing options section - to Sitemap files tab under Indexing options section and click Add. (XML and Text formats only) - The status will show OK. You can validate your Sitemap before submission, for any errors, using their Sitemap Validator https://webmaster.yandex.com/sitemaptest.xml - More Info will show the details of the current version available in the searches and the last updated Sitemap version - It may take two weeks for Yandex Robot to process the new version - Yandex does not provide an option to resubmit your Sitemap. The only way is first delete the existing one and then submit a new one

Server Response Check Tool This is similar to fetch as Google to help webmasters troubleshoot the pages with errors which are not indexed in the searches by YandexBot You can access this tool in multiple places: - Once you logged in to your account, you can see the link in the right side under My Sites section - HTTP Codes option available under Indexing - Excluded Page option available under Indexing How to use this tool: - Enter the right format of the URL, select Yandex Robot type and click Check - Response Code will help you analyze errors - Page Content lets you see content as seen by YandexBot

Excluded Pages Option Go to Excluded Pages option available under Indexing section. Yandex will show the pages from your site that were not indexed by YandexBot under various categories: - HTTP Error Pages (404) - URLs blocked by Robots.txt - Page formats not supported, for example, Sitemap You can set a level of importance for these error codes by clicking on Settings. Click on Links to Pages in the HTML Status Report to see the external and internal pages linking to the error page.

Report Spam Yandex s algorithm solely looks at user experience and keyword ranking metrics and not links and hence they are able to filter out spam links. You can also report on external links to your site if they contain a virus, phishing or search engine spam. - https://webmaster.yandex.com/delspam.xml

Remove URL You can request URL removals when a page no longer exists on your site. This will speed up the process of removal from Yandex s index. It is essential that the page returns a 404 for Yandex to process your request. - https://webmaster.yandex.com/delurl.xml

Robots.txt You can download the robots.txt file from your site on to this tool and check to see if Yandex robot follows the file rules. You can also create a Robots.txt file which you will need to manually upload on to your website to effect a change. - https://webmaster.yandex.com/robots.xml

Structured Data Yandex has a Microformat Validator to check the semantic markup of your site: - Microdata - Schema.org - Microformats - OpenGraph - RDF You can access it here: - https://webmaster.yandex.com/microtest.xml

Site Region Yandex wants you to specify a site region for your website. This is because Yandex employs different ranking algorithms in different regions, and the regional affiliation of a site is one of the factors that's taken into account during the ranking process. If you don t have a clear regional affiliation, it may reduce the ability of the site to rank in certain areas.

Search Queries Yandex provides Popular Queries data with: - Impressions - Clicks The reporting period is a week, and you can report on any week within the last 7 weeks.

Detecting Malware Yandex automatically notifies each time they detect a virus on your site. Each message includes a link for more detailed information: - Examples of affected pages - Date they were checked and antivirus results - Chain of infection and sequence of hosts There is a Recheck button to inform Yandex once your site is clear.

Thank You