How to Submit Your Site to Yandex?

Yandex is a leading search engine in Russia having more than 65% of market share. Yandex also offers searches in English which means you have a potential to extract traffic from Russia. Previously you had an option to submit your site anonymously without registering for Yandex webmaster Tool but at this moment you need a registration for site submission.

Registering and Login to Yandex Webmaster Tools

Unlike Baidu the popular search engine in China, Yandex offers webmaster tools in both Russian and English versions. Though the English version has limited features it will definitely help webmasters around the world to easily submit their site to Yandex search engine.

Click here to register for Yandex account. It is mandatory to have a mobile number, but you can use international numbers to get the SMS verification code.

Once you have an account, click here to login to Yandex Webmaster Tools account.

Adding Site in Yandex

Once logged into Webmaster Tools account, click on the “+” button available on the top navigation bar as shown below:

Enter the URL of your site and click on “Add” button. Remember to enter the correct URL with www and http versions.

Once the site is submitted successfully you will be taken to the summary page. You can view all submitted sites from the dropdown on the top navigation bar.

That’s all!!! You have submitted your site to Yandex.

Next Steps After Submission

The important step after site submission is to verify the ownership rights of your site under “Access Rights” section. Refer separate article published on how to add and verify site in Yandex Webmaster Tools.

After the verification of ownership, submit your Sitemap to Yandex so that all pages on your site can be crawled and indexed easily.

Submitting Important Pages

Similar to fetch as Google option in Google Search Console account, you have an option to request Yandex crawl your important pages on priority. This is called “Reindex pages” and the option is available under “Indexing” section.

After submission of the site, if you change the content or the URL of an important page then use this reindexing option to resubmit the pages to Yandex. You have a daily limit of 20 URL submissions per site.

Guidelines for Site Submission to Yandex

Yandex prefers the site with Russian content and hosted in Russia. Hence, if you are planning to submit your site to Yandex make sure at least a single page in your site is in Russian.

You can include the following meta tag in your Russian page so that Yandex crawler will understand that the page is in Russian.

<META http-equiv="Content-Language" content="RU">

Remember Yandexbot is Aggressive

The problem in submitting your to Yandex is that the Yandexbot will aggressively crawl your site. If you have shared hosting then the server resources will become real problem with Yandexbot. Fortunately you have an option to set crawl delay in robots.txt file to restrict the crawl rate of Yandexbot. Below are some examples of setting crawl delay: