Yandex Webmaster

Yandex Webmaster is Yandex's free webmaster tool. Russian equivalent of Google Search Console. Mandatory if your audience is in Russia or CIS countries.

What it shows

• •Summary — crawling stats, indexation, site quality index (SQI)
• •Indexing — which pages are indexed, which excluded
• •Search queries — clicks, impressions, CTR in Yandex SERP
• •Site issues — critical and potential technical problems
• •Links — external and internal links
• •Turbo pages — Yandex's separate program for accelerated mobile SERP
• •Regional targeting — site-to-region binding for better local ranking

How to connect

1. Visit webmaster.yandex.ru 2. Add the site 3. Verify ownership: meta tag, HTML file, DNS record, txt file, or via Yandex Metrica 4. Submit sitemap.xml

Key differences from GSC

• •SQI (Site Quality Index) — Yandex's proprietary metric from 0 to 100,000. Affects SERP display ("trusted site" badge).
• •Regional targeting — Yandex's local SERP is stricter than Google's. Region binding is critical for local businesses.
• •Turbo pages — Yandex's analog of AMP. Loaded from Yandex servers.
• •Behavioral factors carry more weight than in Google.
• •Manual recrawl — you can request up to 10 URL recrawls per day.

Regular actions

• •On deploy — submit site for recrawl
• •Monthly — review "Site issues" and fix critical ones
• •For regional work — bind in "Regional targeting" section