Yandex
A major search engine in some markets; less central for UK SEO.
What Yandex is
Yandex is a search engine with a large share of search in Russia and some neighbouring markets. It runs its own crawler, index and webmaster tools. For most UK businesses it's a minor or irrelevant source of traffic, but it appears in SEO discussions and in server logs.
What it looks like
A UK guest house sees requests from YandexBot in its server logs and wonders whether to block it. Since the crawler is legitimate and the traffic is light, it leaves it alone. Its time is better spent on Google and Bing, where its actual guests search.
What it means for your clicks
If you serve only UK customers, you don't need to do anything special for Yandex. Good general SEO covers what little traffic it may send. It matters more for businesses targeting markets where it's widely used, which come with their own legal and practical considerations.
Yandex's crawler can also show up in security tools and server logs, which sometimes worries owners. It's a legitimate search engine, and occasional visits are normal for any public website.
How to see where you appear
Look at your analytics for any referrals from Yandex. If there are almost none, there's nothing to do. If your server struggles with crawler traffic, you can manage crawl rates or block crawlers in robots.txt, but check first that the load is real and coming from the genuine crawler.
Wrong assumptions
- Spending time optimising for engines your customers don't use.
- Blocking legitimate crawlers in a panic.
- Trusting any request that claims to be a search engine without checking.
- Forgetting that markets outside the UK have different rules and audiences.
Related search results terms
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