How to submit your sitemap to Yandex

Amos Bastian

Amos Bastian

Yandex is Russia’s biggest search engine, so ensuring your website is indexed on Yandex is crucial for growing your business and getting more organic traffic from Russia. In this article, we’ll show you the quickest way to get indexed on Yandex in 2024.

Set up Yandex Webmaster Tools

We’re written a guide about setting up Yandex Webmaster Tools and everything you can do with it, so we won’t go into too much detail here, but here’s a quick overview of the steps you need to take to get your site indexed on Yandex.

1. Create a Yandex Webmaster Tools account

Go to https://www.bing.com/webmasters and sign up for an account.

2. Add your site to your account

Add website to Yandex Webmaster Tools

If you’ve already set up Google Search Console, you can import your site from there to Yandex Webmaster Tools. If not, you will need to add it manually.

3. Verify your site

Verify website on Yandex Webmaster Tools

If you imported your site from Google Search Console, you don’t need to verify it again. If not, you will need to verify your site to prove that you own it.

You can do this 3 ways:

  1. HTML file upload - Download the HTML verification file and upload it to your site’s root directory. Then click Verify.

  2. HTML tag - Copy the HTML tag (e.g. <meta name="yandex-verification" content="ABC1123" />) and paste it into the <head> section of your site’s homepage. Then click Verify.

  3. TXT record - Add the provided TXT (alias) record (e.g. yandex-verification: ABC123) to your DNS settings. Then click Verify.

Add a Robots.txt file

Yandex uses the same robots.txt file as Google, so if you’ve already added one for Google, you don’t need to do anything. If not, you can add a robots.txt file to your site’s root directory to tell search engines which pages they can and can’t crawl. Here is an example of a robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://indexplease.com/sitemap-index.xml

Submit your sitemap

Submit your sitemap on Yandex Webmaster Tools

You can submit your sitemap to Yandex Webmaster Tools to help Yandex discover your pages. If you don’t have a sitemap, you can create one using one of many sitemap generators available online.

That’s it. If you don’t want to go through the tedious process of submitting all your URLs in your sitemap for indexing on Yandex, you can sign up for IndexPlease and we’ll do it for you. We’ll also submit your pages for indexing on Bing, Google, Naver and Seznam.