How to Add WordPress Site in Yandex Webmaster Tools?

Yandex is one of the popular search engines having 65% of market share in Russia. Though the global search engine market share of Yandex is ignorable in front of Google, it is worth submitting your WordPress site to Yandex. Unlike the Chinese search engine Baidu, Yandex offers a webmaster tools account in English with limited features. This helps all international users to submit their site easily to Yandex.

In this article we will explain step by step process of how to add WordPress site in Yandex Webmaster Tools account.

Getting Into Yandex Webmaster Tools Account

The first step is to register an account for Yandex Webmaster Tools. It is mandatory to have a mobile number for registration as the SMS verification code will be sent to your mobile. You can use international mobile numbers with the country code in the font (for example +1 for USA).

Remember the registration is for the complete Yandex sites (similar to Google accounts) and you will get email and other additional features with the same account credentials. Once you have successfully registered an account, login to your Yandex Webmaster Tools account using the same user name and password.

Adding WordPress Site

The second step is add your WordPress site in Yandex webmaster tools. Click on the “+” button available next to the “Select site” dropdown box as shown in the below picture.

Enter the URL of your site and click on the “Add” button. Ensure to add the correct URL, with or without www and the correct http or https version of your site.

Verifying Site in Yandex

Similar to all other search engines, you need to verify the ownership of your site in Yandex in order to start using the features. Following are the three options available for verifying the ownership of your WordPress site.

• Meta tag – add HTML meta tag on your site which is the easiest way.
• HTML file – upload HTML file on the root directory of your site.
• DNS record – add TXT record entries in your DNS zone file.

We will explain the easiest meta tag verification in this article. Copy the meta tags shown in the box under the “Meta tag” tab.

Adding Yandex Tag in WordPress Site

Basically you can insert the meta tag into the “header.php” file of your WordPress theme. But you need to edit the theme file for this purpose and the changes will be wiped off every time you update your theme to a new version. Otherwise you should use child theme for modifying the core theme files.

Let us not modify the theme file neither use child theme. The easy way is to use one of the SEO plugins to insert the verification code. We recommend you to find a plugin which has Yandex verification option as well as SEO options to combine the tasks.

In our example, let us install and activate Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. Navigate to the dashboard section and add the Yandex verification meta tag under the tab “Webmaster tools” as shown below:

Save your changes.

Verifying Site in Yandex

Go back to Yandex webmaster tools and click the check button available under the “Meta tag” tab of “Access rights” section.

The verification will be successful and you will see the next screen showing the summary dashboard of the added site.

Important Note

Yandex search engine bot will crawl your site aggressively. Hence, the server resources will shoot up drastically when used with Google, Baidu and Bing bots. Ensure that you have sufficient server resource or restrict the crawl delay of the Yandex bot in robots.txt file.