Webmasters and SEOs often rely on link data from well-known third party tools such as Majestic SEO or SEOMoz but forget to dip into search engines’ own data. Google and Bing Webmaster Tools show a representative chunk of your link data. In Google’s case it’s largely the type of links that Google finds to be of some relevance and significance (they tend to omit the ones that have no impact on the site in any way, but still show nofollowed links as they might bring valuable traffic).
Well, here’s another one – Yandex Webmaster Tools:
The idea comes from one of our late night hangout when Alistair Lattimore suggested we try it. I couldn’t resist and signed up immediately by verifying my email, phone and authorising my website through a HTML file upload.
In the screenshot above you can see an overview of external links, filtered by a page URL (/mind-blowing-hack/ also works for directories and with a wildcard modifier *).
What I found refreshing is the way Yandex sorted my links. It’s a lot closer to what I would think are relevant and authoritative sites than how it’s presented in many other tools (particularly Google Webmaster Tols, where you can sort by date or export a pure random list as a CSV file).
The idea is to get as much data as possible from every search engine out there and combine the data into a single link database.
Yandex Webmaster Tools Options & Functionality
Here’s the breakdown of all the options available within Yandex Webmaster Tools:
- General information
- Indexing
- Site structure
- Pages on search
- Links to website
- Excluded pages
- Indexing history
- Number of requests
- HTTP codes
- Indexing options
- Robots.txt analysis
- Sitemap files
- Main mirror
- Search queries
- Popular queries
- History
- My regions
- My searches
- Statistics
- Settings
- Site geography
- Site region
- Appearance in search results
- SERP links
- URL letter case
- Security
- Verification
Thanks.
Checking it out at the moment.
It’s nice to see a different webmaster tool software apart from the one we’re all used to.
You’ve beat me to this Dan! Recently started a Russian SEO project and saw the potential of using the Yandex as a link analysis tool. I can’t believe how good it is! Good post though, gonna help a lot of people out.
There is more to Yandex Webmasters than the link profile data though.
They’ve got a number of groovy features, like being able to change how your URLs are presented in the SERP (ie letter casing), you can specify specific queries that you’d like detailed information on like impressions/click through rate. I think being able to see the URLs easily in your site that have been excluded via meta robots tags, a great feature for ecommerce sites is being able to see the non-canonical URLs that Yandex is crawling.
The other feature I thought was interesting was they provide a measure of importance, like PageRank, within their webmaster console known as Thematic Citation Index (TIC). Importantly, they are providing help documents for webmasters to better understand what TIC is and how it is calculated.
Another interesting feature of the webmaster console is that you can see the TIC figure broken down by region, so you might have a particularly high TIC in Russia but a much weaker TIC in United Kingdom – even though your content is relevant to both areas as an example. That is very helpful to a webmaster and suggests to me that the regional nature of links really matters to Yandex regarding how likely a page might be returned for a given query by a user located in area X of the world.
You should publish a complete guide to Yandex Webmaster Tools on your new blog.
Funny to see that Yandex still tries indexing URLs I already deleted a few years ago and tells me a 404. Setting up my robots.txt and sitemap.xml @ Yandex might bust their wrong 404 listings.
TIC is somewhat confusion. It also seems to be a region based. They also show TIC in search result if it is above TIC10.
Yandex retrieves data from different SE but most of the time fails to display identical links and displays a single link for multiple times
Yandex has got nice Metrics as well. As for me, I like it even more than Google Analytics. It’s just more clear. As a SE, Yandex is better for commercial queries and people in Russia mostly use it that way. While Google is used for some educational info, or smth like that.
What I don’t like in Yandex is that it indexes pages VERY slowly as compared with Google. Anyway, if a site is updated on regular basis it index it much faster. Just to “help” Yandex I suggest you to use Twitter. It really helps.
Cheers!
Yandex has got nice Metrics as well. As for me, I like it even more than Google Analytics. It’s just more clear. As a SE, Yandex is better for commercial queries and people in Russia mostly use it that way. While Google is used for some educational info, or smth like that.
What I don’t like in Yandex is that it indexes pages VERY slowly as compared with Google. Anyway, if a site is updated on regular basis it index it much faster. Just to “help” Yandex I suggest you to use Twitter. It really helps.
Cheers!