Yandex Index Checker

What is the Yandex Index Checker?

The Yandex Index Checker is a free tool that searches Yandex for one page URL and reports whether that page appears in Yandex's organic results. Indexed means the page came back in Yandex's results. It works for any public page, including pages on sites you do not own, with no Yandex Webmaster access needed.

How to use the Yandex Index Checker

1. Paste the full URL of one page, such as https://example.com/blog/post. The tool checks that exact page, not the whole site.
2. Press Check Yandex index. The tool searches Yandex for that exact URL.
3. If the result is locked, sign in or create a free spyc account to see it. The check has already run.
4. Read the status: Indexed or URL is Not Indexed, with the number of results scanned and the time of the check.

Do you need to be indexed in Yandex?

Only if you have an audience there. Yandex is the leading search engine in Russia and is used across Russian-speaking markets. If none of your visitors come from those markets, a page missing from Yandex is not a problem to fix.

If some do, check it separately. Yandex runs its own crawler and its own index, and shares nothing with Google or Bing, so a page indexed in both of those can still be missing here. Run the Google Index Checker and the Bing Index Checker alongside this one to compare.

How does Yandex read robots.txt?

Yandex follows your User-agent: * rules, but uses a User-agent: Yandex group instead when one exists. It also supports Clean-param, which Google does not. It names query parameters that do not change the page, such as utm_source or a session ID, so Yandex treats every variant as one URL instead of crawling each.

Two directives no longer do anything in Yandex. Host: was dropped in 2018, and Yandex stopped reading Crawl-delay the same year in favour of the crawl-rate setting in Yandex Webmaster. If either is still in your file, it is noise.

How do I add my site to Yandex?

Add and verify the site in Yandex Webmaster, then submit your sitemap. Yandex Webmaster also has a page recrawl tool for individual URLs, and it shows Yandex's own record of each URL on your site.

Yandex co-launched IndexNow with Microsoft, so a single IndexNow submission reaches Yandex and Bing together.

How does this Yandex index checker work?

It searches Yandex for the exact URL you enter and marks the page Indexed only when that same page comes back in Yandex's organic results. The query is the URL with a url: prefix, sent through a search API, and the result shows how many organic results were scanned.

A page matches when its path, query string and fragment are the same as the URL you entered. A trailing slash is ignored and the host is not compared, so the https:// and www. versions of one page count as one. The Google and Bing checkers use the same method, so the three results are directly comparable.

A page that is Indexed in Google and Bing but missing here points at something specific to Yandex: a User-agent: Yandex group in robots.txt, a mirror problem, or a page Yandex has not discovered yet. A page missing from all three points at the page itself. The status is a snapshot of one search, so confirm a surprising result in Yandex Webmaster before acting on it.

The check needs no Yandex account and no access to the site, so it also works for a competitor's page, or a client's site before you have Yandex Webmaster access.

What is Yandex Webmaster, the Yandex search console?

Yandex Webmaster is Yandex's free console for site owners, the equivalent of Google Search Console. You add and verify a site there, then submit sitemaps, request recrawls and read Yandex's own data about your pages.

Its indexing reports show how many of your pages are in search and which ones were added or removed, with a reason for each removal. It also checks the status of a single URL on your verified site. For a site you own, that record is the one to trust. This checker covers sites you cannot verify, and quick checks without signing in.

Yandex Webmaster also has a regional setting for your site. Yandex ranks many searches by the searcher's region, so a site aimed at one city or country can say so there. Its server response check fetches a page as Yandex's robot and shows the status code and headers it got, which catches a firewall that blocks YandexBot while browsers load the page normally.

Verification does not carry over from Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, because Yandex shares no accounts with either, so add the site to Yandex Webmaster on its own. Webmaster also shows the site's quality index, Yandex's own measure of how useful the site is to its users.

Why is Yandex not indexing my page?

Usually for one of the same reasons Google skips a page: robots.txt blocks it, a noindex sits on it, it redirects or returns an error, or it duplicates another page. Check the User-agent: Yandex group in robots.txt first, because Yandex uses that group instead of * when one exists, and rules written only for Googlebot do not reach it.

Yandex also leaves out pages it judges of little use to searchers, and Yandex Webmaster lists excluded pages with the reason for each. A page Yandex has never fetched may simply be undiscovered: add it to your sitemap, link to it from indexed pages, and submit it with the recrawl tool or IndexNow.

Mirrors are the Yandex-specific trap. Yandex groups the www., non-www., http:// and https:// versions of a site as mirrors and shows only the main mirror in search. Since it dropped Host:, it picks the main mirror from your 301 redirects, so redirect every version to the one you want. A page tested under a non-main mirror's address can show as not indexed while the main mirror's copy is in search.

Does Yandex read sitemaps and canonical tags?

Yes. Yandex reads XML sitemaps in the standard sitemaps.org format, from a Sitemap: line in robots.txt or a submission in Yandex Webmaster. A sitemap that is broken for Google is broken for Yandex too, so the XML Sitemap Validator is worth running before you submit.

Yandex also reads rel="canonical" and treats it as a hint rather than an order, as Google does. It honours the robots meta tag with noindex, and it supports its own <noindex> tag, which keeps a fragment of text on a page out of its index while the rest of the page stays in.

Yandex follows the same per-file limits as other engines, 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed, reads sitemap index files that list several sitemaps, and accepts gzipped sitemaps.

Declare the sitemap in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line as well as submitting it, so Yandex finds it whenever it reads your robots.txt. The sitemaps protocol expects URLs to be escaped, so a page with Cyrillic characters in its path is listed with those characters percent-encoded.