For the first time since the October data-centre attacks, at least one of Russia’s update trackers has logged a Yandex text update. Promosite’s update analyser recorded one on 7 November at 14:55 (its own timestamp), with the index rolled out “as of 6 November 2026”. The previous entry on the same list is 7 October, which carried an index dated 30 September. Promosite’s owner noted at the time that Yandex indexing “stopped a bit” after 7, 9 and 11 October. On that tracker, then, there was no text update for a month.
That is the headline. The forums describe the month leading up to it, and they suggest one update won’t fix things straight away. Here is what webmasters have been reporting since our last Yandex forum recap on 23 October.
Commercial sites frozen, info sites moving
The long-running “Яндекс колбасит” thread on Searchengines.guru had a busy morning on 5 November. Moderator Antony Kazansky said that across the 21 sites on his working list, with IKS scores from zero to about 1,500, “without exception the picture is roughly the same”: the most recent click data dated from 6 October and the most recent indexing from 5 to 10 October.
Not everyone agreed. One webmaster, Valentina, said a 15-year-old entertainment and horoscope site was indexing and ranking normally. Even so, a page she sent for recrawl showed as indexed in Webmaster within half an hour but couldn’t be found in search for its main query unless she added the domain. Another member, Sergei Naurov, summed up the split: his interesting-facts content site “updates perfectly”, while his commercial service sites have shown “zero changes since the start of October”. He said he had no idea whether topic, age or quality explained it. Another poster said they had tried everything on six projects and new pages simply weren’t coming through. In their view, only big news publishers pushing thousands of articles a day were getting any of them in, and even then at random and temporarily.
Old and new results swapping places
The other complaint that keeps coming up is unstable SERPs. One member wrote that Yandex keeps alternating between the new results and results from a week earlier that still include pages already deleted. Veteran poster alaev said that bug predates the attacks but has become “extremely obvious”. Others reported results going off-topic after the first page or two. alaev’s overall verdict was blunt: “It’s obviously just broken.”
On the next page the discussion turned to why. Kazansky’s view is that the problem is mainly resources: scheduled updates are being processed in a queue, and Yandex itself probably doesn’t know when everything will clear. Naurov asked how anyone rebuilds compute quickly when GPUs have waiting lists. alaev disagreed: search, Direct, Metrika and Webmaster have all been knocked sideways, and he called that “a software problem, not hardware”. One member added that there had been no database-update letter, so they assumed Yandex wasn’t updating the base in order not to break it.
Yandex still won’t give a date
The official position hasn’t moved. On the Yandex Webmaster blog, a user asked on 30 October when all the tools, particularly Site move, would be working again. Yandex’s Platon support account replied on 4 November: “We can’t say exactly yet when all tools will work in full.” That is consistent with the partial restore we covered on 2 November.
Our take
The forum posts above came two days before the 7 November update, so read them as the state of play going in, not a verdict on it. An index dated 6 November is the first real sign that new documents are moving through the pipeline again. But one text update after a month doesn’t mean the commercial backlog has cleared, and the forum’s view that informational content recovers before commercial pages is worth testing on your own sites.
Practically: check whether pages published between 10 October and 6 November are now findable by query, not just by URL or domain. Annotate 7 November in your reporting. Remember that rank data from this period is also affected by the Search API capacity cuts and vendor data-source switches. If the next text update follows within days, recovery is under way. If it takes another month, the bottleneck is still there.