Two weeks after the data-centre incident that took Yandex Webmaster offline, Russian SEO forums have moved on from outage reports to a slower, more frustrating problem: new pages are not getting into the Yandex index, or are getting there days late. Here is what webmasters on Searchengines.guru have been reporting since our last Yandex forum recap on 19 October.
As usual with forum recaps, this is anecdotal. These are individual webmasters describing their own sites, not confirmed Yandex statements. Yandex has not said anything about indexing delays.
Fresh content is stuck
The clearest theme in the long-running “Яндекс колбасит” (Yandex is shaking) thread is indexing latency. On 21 October one publisher said that across five news and information sites, even very topical articles were appearing in Yandex results after three to four days at best, compared with roughly two hours before. They said about 90% of their visits were landing on September content, and that a new niche site launched as a test showed the same pattern.
Others backed this up. One webmaster said a page created on 14 October was still not indexed a week later. Another replied that they had stopped publishing altogether. On 22 October a user said an article from the previous week was in the results, but not for its most direct query, and that a Tuesday article hadn’t appeared at all, even though new pages used to show up within an hour. A third said one article had “slipped through” and then nothing.
One forum regular claimed the live search base is effectively frozen at 5 October, meaning before the incident. That fits the reports, but it is one person’s reading, not something Yandex has confirmed.
Recrawl is still blocked, so is IndexNow the workaround?
In the data-centre incident thread, a webmaster who submitted a new site to Webmaster in early October said that, as of 22 October, not a single page had been indexed. Replies split into two camps. Some argued nothing will work until Webmaster is fully back, pointing out that Webmaster’s data had not updated since the 6th. Others countered that indexing itself is running, just badly.
What everyone agrees on is that adding pages to Recrawl (Переобход) in Webmaster is still blocked. That matches what we reported on 21 October, when Direct was restored but Webmaster recrawl and removal were still read-only. Several users suggested IndexNow as the alternative. One long-time member said IndexNow does get their pages indexed, although they had never used Webmaster recrawl anyway. Others were less convinced it is a fix in the current situation.
Another forum member added some speculation of their own: if Yandex lost its stored page copies, it may be rebuilding the index without them, which could mean more volatile positions for a while. To be clear, that is a forum theory, not a confirmed fact.
Metrika gaps continue
Analytics complaints haven’t gone away either. On 22 October one advertiser asked whether anyone else was missing Direct visits (both search and the YAN network) in Metrika’s Visitors report, saying 99% hadn’t been showing for four days. Another said Metrika counter informers on some of their sites had shown zero since 17 October, even though Metrika data inside Webmaster was counting normally.
Other threads included a webmaster who said a site blocked by Roskomnadzor on the 6th, then moved to a new domain, was back on top for all its queries on the old domain. That led to a side debate about whether Yandex sanctions follow a site to a new domain. This is an old argument, and nothing here settles it.
My take
The pattern lines up with the timeline. Yandex prioritised getting its revenue products back first: Pay, then Direct, then the Search API. Freshness indexing and Webmaster tooling are clearly further down the list. If you publish time-sensitive content in Russia, set up IndexNow now (it costs nothing), keep pushing Yandex Business and Dzen distribution, and don’t read anything into Yandex ranking changes for new URLs until Webmaster updates again. Stopping publishing entirely, as some forum users have, seems like an overreaction. Those pages will be crawled eventually, just without the freshness boost.