A detailed guide to Yandex.Webmaster: part 1

Yandex.Webmaster is a free service from Yandex Corporation, created specifically for website owners. Here you can get extremely broad functionality to control the efficiency of your own site. In particular, here you will be able to obtain information about the official statistics of the site's operation, use tools to control the indexing and technical condition of the resource, see how your site is displayed in Yandex search results and, if necessary, perform optimization.

Using Yandex.Webmaster in practice, you will be able to diagnose errors, track the positions of a single page for key queries, improve the quality of content, analyze the link mass and perform a number of other activities aimed at increasing the ranking of the site.

We will devote this review to a detailed acquaintance with the Yandex.Webmaster service. Due to the extremely wide functionality of this platform, as well as the need to pay attention to all key aspects, we divided our guide into 2 separate blocks. So, in part 1 we will consider what Yandex.Webmaster is and what business tasks you can solve with its help.

We will tell you how to connect your site to Yandex.Webmaster. We will get acquainted in detail with the sections “Summary”, “Site Optimization”, “Site Quality”, “Indexing”, as well as all the tools that are presented in them. Other tabs and solutions that this service offers to users will be considered in detail in part 2.

Yandex.Webmaster: what is this service

Yandex.Webmaster is a free-to-use service designed to control the operation of a site and its presentation in search. This is what will allow you to adjust your site to the requirements and requests of the search engine, which will ultimately have a positive effect on its subsequent ranking and overall performance. The main functional capabilities of this tool include:

• Site diagnostics and technical audit. The service will help you identify errors on the site that have a negative impact on its indexing and promotion in general, as well as find the most effective and simple way to eliminate them.
• Indexing statistics. You will have detailed information at your disposal on how Yandex search bots index a particular page of the site.
• Convenient monitoring of site positions. You will be able to track the positions of each of the pages of your site in the search results for different keywords, track the dynamics.
• Analysis of the link mass. Yandex.Webmaster will show you all external links leading to the site, thanks to which you will be able to monitor their performance and quality.
• Setting up site localization. You will be able to specify which region your site belongs to, which will affect its results in the search results.
• Editing site information. In particular, you will be able to adjust snippets, as well as make changes to other indicators as the need arises.
• A wide range of tools for SEO optimization. In Yandex.Webmaster, you will be able to get up-to-date recommendations on improving content, increasing page loading speed, and other factors that directly affect ranking.

These functional capabilities allow us to conclude that using Yandex.Webmaster in practice will allow you to promptly learn about technical problems on the site that can negatively affect the user experience, as well as the position of your resource in the search results as a whole. This solution will also improve the visibility of the page in search: you will receive information directly from the system, which will allow you to configure parameters with high precision and take actions aimed at optimizing the site. You will also be able to ensure higher site security indicators and promptly respond to emerging threats.

But Yandex Webmaster's capabilities are not limited to this. Now we will consider the functionality of this service in as much detail as possible, which will allow you to get your bearings in its specifics and features, and understand the need to use it in your own practice. This tool will be most useful in the work of Internet marketers and SEO specialists.

Now we will consider the main tabs and tools of Yandex.Webmaster step by step.

Nuances of adding a site to Yandex.Webmaster

To start working with this tool, you must first add the site to Yandex.Webmaster. You can do this yourself, using our recommendations. The upcoming work can be divided into 2 key stages:

1. Log in to your Yandex account. You should use the same data on the main page of Yandex Webmaster by clicking on the "Login" button. After that, you need to click on the icon with the “+” sign or on the “Add” button. Specify the URL of your site here and also click on the “Add” button. At this point, we recommend that you pay special attention to how, in your opinion, the site should be displayed in the search - with or without the www prefix. In the Yandex search engine, this point plays a very important role. But even if you do not do this right away, you can make the appropriate adjustments and changes at any time. We also want to draw attention to the importance of writing https instead of http before the main address. This is what will tell the system that your site has an SSL-certificate, that is, you are concerned about the security of your site.
2. Confirm your rights to this site. To implement this idea, you can use several methods. The first option is to use a meta tag. Initially, you generate it, and then insert it into the code of the main page immediately before the closing tag "head". To do this, go to the root directory of the site header.php via FTP using a specialized software solution or through the CMS of the site. The second possible option is to create a special HTML file. This option will be simpler in comparison with the previous one and it is used in practice quite often. Here you just copy the code and paste it into the file. It is also possible to download the finished file and publish it in the root directory. Another possible option is to add a TXT record to the DNS domain. Here, the work is performed through the hosting control panel where your domain is located. Regardless of which method you choose, here you ultimately need to click on the "Check" button located at the bottom of the screen.

We would also like to draw your attention to the fact that a number of designers offer the ability to confirm rights to the site. For example, you can do this in CMS 1C-Bitrix, Tilda and a number of other popular CMS platforms. By and large, confirmation of rights to work with adding a site to the Yandex.Webmaster tool is complete. This means that you can start working. If necessary, you can transfer your access rights to other users. We will tell you how to do this correctly below.

Section "Summary" with general information about the site

Summary - Yandex.Webmaster dashboard, which will visualize the main information about the site. Here you can see information about problems with your resource, the last changes made to the index, as well as data on search engine promotion. If you pay attention to the top of this page, you will see links to Yandex advertising offers, as well as tips taken from the blog. In total, the "Summary" page will present you with 7 separate blocks:

1. Diagnostics. Here you will see information about problems on the site, all error messages that affect the correct operation of the site. Moreover, here are links to recommended materials, having studied which you will be able to perform optimization as correctly as possible.
2. Yandex.Business. Here is a link to your company profile, user ratings, as well as recommendations from the system.
3. Duplicate descriptions, headings. Go here if you want to find out general information about all meta tags, including title and description, that are repeated on the pages of your site.
4. Search clicks. Here you will see in the form of a graph information about the total number of transitions to the site that come from the search engine, that is, here we are talking about organic traffic. Also additionally provided are detailed statistics of impressions and transitions for each of the key queries. This way you will see the overall picture of the ranking of your site at the current moment.
5. Crawl history. This tab will contain a summary of pages whose status has changed over a certain period of time. It is important to pay attention to pages marked as 4XX. Most likely, this is a 404 error, meaning that the page is not available on the server.
6. Search update. Here you will see a list of all pages that have been added to the index or excluded from it. If you see pages marked with a red "minus", it means that they were removed from the search during the last indexing. What is marked with a green "plus" sign indicates recently added pages. If you pay attention to the histogram, the total array of removed links will be indicated in gray.
7. Dynamics of the IKS. Here you will see a graph demonstrating the quality of the site. The IKS parameter is based on a huge amount of data based on the interaction of the audience and your site. This is convenience, thoughtfulness, functionality and satisfaction from the interaction as a whole. As the site operates, this parameter may change, so you need to constantly monitor it to maintain high rates.

As you can see, the "summary" tab contains quite a lot of information about the state of the site as a whole. Make it a habit to visit it regularly and monitor the main aspects, as well as eliminate them before they negatively affect the site's operation.

The "Site Optimization" section with useful information from Yandex

The "Site Optimization" section from Yandex.Webmaster is a solution that will allow you to quickly identify errors, as well as gain access to detailed information from the search engine, which will help you ensure the effective promotion of your site. Let's take a closer look at the 3 separate tabs provided here.

Site Diagnostics

Site Diagnostics is a Webmaster subsection that informs about errors that can have a negative impact on the indexing of the site, as well as on its correct operation. Here, all errors will be divided into 4 separate categories depending on their impact on the resource:

1. Recommendations. What will be presented here cannot be called an error, since these are just search engine tips on improving the site in order to improve its ranking.
2. Possible. These are problems that potentially affect the quality of site indexing, which can also negatively affect the position of the resource in the search results. Here you can add all the errors that the system detects in the sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, meta tags, the operation of Yandex. Metrica counters.
3. Critical. Serious errors that have a negative impact on the site's operation, but the resource remains accessible to visitors. Such problems include broken internal links, slow server response, incorrect SSL certificate settings.
4. Fatal. An extremely serious violation, up to and including no access to the server, security issues. This is what prevents the search bot from indexing the site. Such problems must be resolved as quickly as possible, because otherwise your site will remain inaccessible to the audience, which means it will not work.

For greater convenience of work on this page, the Yandex.Webmaster service offers filters that allow sorting depending on the type of error. If it turns out that there really is a problem on your site, this tool will show the date of its appearance and offer to verify its relevance. In cases where you do not agree with the site's opinion, you can contact technical support for clarifications and explanations.

Optimization Tips

In this section of Yandex.Webmaster, you will find information that can help optimize the site using the platform's internal tools. If problems are detected during the check, the system will not only point them out by putting an exclamation mark, but will also offer the best way to fix them. This is what will allow you to significantly save time and effort on monitoring errors and finding the most effective solutions.

Security and violations

In the “Security and violations” section of Yandex.Webmaster, you will find information about all suspicious actions occurring on your site. Everything that can cause a specific page to be removed from the index or a sharp deterioration in positions will be displayed here. This may apply not only to the presence of malicious code that poses a potential danger to users, but also directly to various manipulations with search results, including:

• redirecting users to third-party resources;
• filling the site with texts artificially saturated with key queries that do not carry a semantic load (spam);
• using hidden, almost invisible text saturated with key queries;
• adding secondary content to pages that does not carry much meaning, as well as copying materials from other sites;
• imitating user actions in order to increase ranking indicators;
• massively saturating the text with external links, the quality of which is highly questionable;
• placing invisible additional elements or buttons over the main forms to covertly obtain information about these users, that is, without their consent.

After checks, you receive a corresponding notification. If no errors are found, the site will inform you that no threats were found on the site. If problems are found, Yandex.Webmaster will show what exactly is involved and provide information that will help fix the error. To minimize potential risks, install good antivirus software on your server and use only reliable, proven CMS plugins in your work. You must understand that one of the mandatory conditions for a site to be included in the search results will be its safety for users. Think about how to ensure all this within your site.

Section “Site Quality” with official ratings from the search engine

The “Site Quality” section provides information about the official rating of your site from the search engine to the attention of Yandex.Webmaster users. Now let's look at the main tabs that you can find here.

Quality indicators

This category of Yandex.Webmaster contains statistics on changes in the IKS indicator of a site, as well as other characteristics that determine the quality of the site. At the top there is an interactive calendar in which you can select a suitable period of time for analysis. You can also manually select an interval, be it a month, quarter, or year. Please note that the correlation between the IKS indicator and the positions in the search results will not always be direct. The fact is that most modern search engines, including Yandex, take into account a huge number of parameters when evaluating a site.

Currently, this search engine uses the so-called quality marks system. You can also get them for performing certain actions. For example:

• having an SSL certificate on your website allows you to receive the “Secure Connection” badge;
• filling out your company profile in the Yandex Business service automatically awards the “Officiality Badge”;
• if the search engine identifies your website as a store, it will assign it the “Goods” badge: you cannot influence this in any way.

You can monitor how close your website is to receiving a certain badge directly on the page of this subsection.

Along with badges, you can also find related information in this block:

1. Comparison with competitors. Here you can get acquainted with the quality indicators of your closest competitors' websites and compare them with yours. The number of websites for analysis can be unlimited. Here you just need to click on the button “+Add competitor's site to comparison”, and then specify the corresponding URL address. Additionally, sorting of sites by the IKS indicator is provided.
2. Achievements and statistics. Here you will find information about key indicators that have a direct impact on the promotion of the resource. This can also be a summary of page monitoring, problems in operation, etc.
3. Recommendations. Pay attention to the advice from the search engine that will help your resource take higher positions in the search results and attract traffic.

Reviews

In this subsection, Yandex.Webmaster provides the ability to work with 2 categories of reviews:

1. Reviews about the company. Responses from Yandex Maps from people who interacted with your business will be automatically sent here.
2. Reviews about the site. They can be left by all authorized users of Yandex Browser without exception. They will directly indicate the thoughtfulness and convenience of your site.

If necessary, you can additionally add a scale here that will display the ratio of positive and negative reviews. We have repeatedly pointed out in our reviews the need to respond to user responses, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. In the first case, it will be enough for you to simply thank for the high rating, say that you will be glad to receive repeated requests. In the case of negativity, it will be necessary to smooth over the situation as much as possible, find out the cause and find ways to solve it. At least, this is what any company that cares about its own reputation on the network should do.

Section “Indexing” with information about the site

The “Indexing” section of Yandex.Webmaster will contain all the information that Yandex search bots know about your site. Surely you know that the site pages will be added to the search after the guard visits them, checks them and assigns the appropriate status. In the same way, these pages can also drop out of the search based on the scanning results. Bots carry out such crawls with a certain frequency, as a result of which individual site pages move to the top of the search results, move down, or even disappear altogether. That is, it is important for you to monitor indexing in order to understand whether everything is in order with your site or whether optimization needs to be performed. This section is extremely large and includes a large number of subsections, which we will consider further.

Crawl statistics

Here the information will be presented in the form of graphs and tables. In particular, the system displays the number of pages that have recently been indexed on the graph, as well as those whose status has changed. Such graphs are built every week.

The table will contain information about the URL addresses of the site pages, the current statuses. Of the main designations that are worth monitoring, we will highlight:

• N/a - indicates that the page status is unknown before the last crawl;
• 200 OK - displays the correct server response, that is, the page is working correctly;
• 301 Moved Permanently - indicates that a redirect is configured on the page, that is, users are being redirected to another URL;
• 404 Not Found - indicates that the page does not exist or is unavailable on the server.

You can sort the statuses as needed. If you need to check certain pages, be it a catalog section, you need to check the menu located at the top of the page.

Pages in search

This is worth going to if you need to quickly find out which pages have been indexed and which, on the contrary, have been deleted and why this happened. Here you will also see a graph at the top displaying general summary information about pages added and dropped out of the index. Here you can also use filters and sort changes by time or by sections of your site. A little lower you will see a full list of pages with their addresses, titles.

Those pages that have dropped out of the index will be supplemented with the reason for the exclusion. You just need to click on the button with the ellipsis located next to it to open additional information. There are also links containing information on possible ways to eliminate the detected errors. Please note: the search base changes regularly. This means that you need to check here regularly to stay up to date with all the changes that occur with the site.

Site structure

Search bots see the site structure completely differently than we do. That is, not all sections may be displayed here. If the catalog contains less than 10 pages, it may not be taken into account at all. To prevent this from happening, you need to look at your site through the eyes of a bot. If it turns out that some important section is missing from the structure, you can add it yourself. For this purpose, the service has a corresponding button. We would also like to draw your attention to the fact that you can independently close a certain section of the site from indexing by search bots by making a special entry in the robots.txt file.

All pages

In this subsection of Yandex.Webmaster, if necessary, you can download an archive of absolutely all pages that are in the search. It will be generated automatically based on the Sitemap.xml file. This is where you will find detailed information about all indexed pages.

Page check

Visit this subsection if you need to see how bots understand your site. In this case, the Yandex.Webmaster service analyzes the URL of the site, and then provides the following information about it:

• page metadata;
• information about the operation of JavaScript scripts;
• server response status;
• page screenshot, its text version;
• date of the last crawl of your site by a bot.

Here you can also find a link that allows you to configure the processing of JavaScript scripts. This is quite important, as these components have a direct impact on page loading speed and, as a result, user satisfaction with interaction with the site.

Monitoring key site pages

Any site has pages containing information of increased importance. Those that must be promoted. You will find information about them in this section. Most of these are landing pages, product cards, catalog sections. You can independently create a so-called control list to track important pages or rely on search engine recommendations. The pages that you want to add to monitoring must be connected via a link individually or all together.

Changes that occur on your pages will be automatically recorded by the system, and you will be notified by email or in the corresponding section of Yandex.Webmaster. It is there that you can make all the necessary settings, make it as convenient and easy as possible for you to receive information about all the changes that occur on the site.

Re-crawling pages

If you want the bot to index your new pages, articles added to the product card catalog as quickly as possible, you can "ask" it to do so right here. You will need to upload a list of addresses and click the "Send" button. All these pages will appear at the bottom of the list, and along with them the crawl status.

Please note: today, the Yandex search engine has daily limits on re-crawling pages. They will directly depend on the IKS of your site. If this indicator is less than 10, then a limit of 30 pages is set. If the IKS indicator of your site is over 1000, then you can manually send up to 240 pages for repeated crawling every day. Then there is also a proportional growth. You will see your daily limit directly on the site under the column for entering the URL address.

Sitemap files

Sitemap, that is, a site map, is created so that search bots can determine the structure of your site as accurately as possible. Such a file is generated in xml format. It will contain all the pages that are significant for the site. The presence of such a file will speed up the indexing process, make the ranking in the search more correct and accurate.

If you specify links to files in robots.txt, they will automatically be displayed in Yandex.Webmaster. But if you wish, you can also add a map yourself by specifying its address. Also in this subsection you will find information about how correctly search bots work with your Sitemap.

Crawl by counters

Crawl by counters is the option that will help bots crawl your site more efficiently, and the search engine itself will quickly learn about the appearance of new pages on your site. It is activated through the "Settings" section, namely in the "Link to Yandex Metrica" tab. As soon as you link this counter, you need to activate crawling. After that, you will be shown the pages found by the search engine.

Along with new pages, there may also be those that you do not want to see in your search. If this is detected on your site, then it will be necessary to put a ban on their indexing.

Moving a site

Moving or migrating a site is a rather drastic measure, which involves transferring a resource to another site and not only. If something similar has been implemented on your resource, then you should definitely monitor the information presented in this section. Here you can also find useful information if you have installed an SSL certificate on your site and are switching to https, if you are changing the main mirror from the www version to the non-www version or vice versa. To implement the move itself, you will need to do the following in this subsection:

1. Add a new version of the site to the Yandex.Webmaster service.
2. In the old version, go to the "Site Move" subsection and check the corresponding box.
3. Click the "Save" button.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that the migration itself is not a one-minute process. On average, moving a site takes up to 2 weeks. At the same time, do not forget to create a new sitemap for search bots.

Crawl speed

In this case, we mean how quickly search bots will check the pages of your resource. Yandex allows site owners to independently specify the desired speed. To do this, you need to go to the "Set manually" tab, and then move the slider to the right or left depending on what result you want to get at the output.

So, if you see that your server is subject to increased loads due to too frequent activity of search bots, then you are recommended to reduce the crawl speed. And vice versa, if the content on the site is updated quite actively, then it is important that the indexing takes place as quickly as possible. Accordingly, in this case, we increase the speed.

Titles and descriptions

The "Titles and descriptions" subsection allows you to quickly identify identical titles and descriptions on your site. Additionally, this report will contain other useful information:

• summary data on the number and percentage of URLs where duplicate meta tags were detected;
• examples of pages where duplicate titles and descriptions were detected;
• tips containing links to Yandex advisory documentation that will help fix the identified problem;
• uploading information from reports to an XLS table or a CSV file, which will allow you to see the contents of the tags;
• the date of the last crawl of your pages by the bot.

This tool will be extremely useful for multi-page resources. This is especially relevant for online stores and blogs. It is in such conditions that duplicate titles and descriptions are most often encountered in practice, which is due to the specifics of the CMS. But if you see where exactly such a problem is located, you can eliminate it by increasing the uniqueness of the description of the titles. Just remember to send the corresponding URL for re-crawl after that.

Rendering JavaScript pages

This subsection of Yandex.Webmaster will allow you to directly instruct the bot to process all scripts embedded in your page. Today, you can use 3 solutions:

1. Do not render. This option is for sites where pre-rendering is already initially configured.
2. At the discretion of the Yandex robot. The best option for cases when your resource has a fairly large number of scripts that can have a negative impact on the speed of loading sites and their display.
3. I recommend rendering. This is a solution for large sites.

Additionally, here you can also check the correctness of the display of a particular page without loading JavaScript and with it.

Intermediate results

In part 1 of our large-scale guide to the Yandex.Webmaster service, we looked at some of the main sections and subsections. Next, we will continue to get acquainted with them so that you can form the most comprehensive and complete picture of this tool, so that you can understand how functionally useful it will be within the framework of your business.

But here we want to draw attention to the fact that not everyone can use the capabilities of Yandex.Webmaster, due to the presence of regional restrictions on access blocking. You can easily and simply bypass them by connecting mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service. Follow the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy to get acquainted with the specifics of this solution, its functionality, and also to evaluate the simplicity and ease of use during free testing. Thanks to such a connection, you can ensure high levels of privacy and security of work on the Internet, reliable protection from any unauthorized access, as well as flexible and simple work with any services, platforms, tools, including during automation of work. At the same time, mobile proxy tariffs are quite reasonable and justified.

For additional advice, contact the technical support service, which operates around the clock.

Makaleyi paylaşın: