Yandex fatal error. Critical error in Yandex webmaster. Traffic from Google has doubled

About a year ago (or more) Yandex made it possible to find out in Yandex Webmaster whether sanctions have been applied to your site or not.

And now a year has passed.

Today I will tell you which of these “sanction” signals work and which do not work.

It looks something like this:

The sanctions themselves have 4 types: Fatal problems, Critical problems, Possible problems, Recommendations.

Fatal problems This is essentially a site ban. Usually this is something very serious. For example, a ban for buying links, boosting PF, Spam text,..

If you have a fatal problem in Webmaster, then usually the site is either completely removed from the Yandex index or traffic becomes almost zero.

In fact, fatal problems are very rare. I've only seen this once. One person was banned for Minusinsk.

Of course, if you see fatal problems on the site, you need to fix them urgently.

Critical Issues These are mainly some technical problems with the site. An example of such problems: There is a virus on the site, the site gives a 404 error, the site takes a long time to load...

Here is an example of the most common problem: Long server response.

The average robot response time for all pages on your site exceeds 3 seconds. The problem could arise due to a long response returned by the server when a search robot accesses some pages of the site. If the server currently responds quickly, as the Yandex robot crawls the site, the problem will no longer be relevant and the error message will disappear.

In fact, I can say that if you have on your website Critical issue, then the traffic to your site will decrease. The site will be in the Yandex index, but the traffic will drop significantly.

After you fix the problem, traffic will be restored, but NOT COMPLETELY.

Yes, by the way, this is an interesting thing from Yandex - if sanctions are imposed on a site, but then the site comes out of sanctions, then traffic is not completely restored. Why is it unclear. They say that this is a punishment and that he should not violate it again.

Possible problems these are the most common problems. In fact, half (or more) of these problems are not problems.

Well, judge for yourself, these are the problems: Robots, txt are missing, Host is not registered in the robots, Distribution is missing,..

Moreover, the impact of many of these problems is often completely different. We will talk about this in more detail.

Missing robots,txt, Not registered in Host robots — strange as it may seem, Yandex believes that this problem is significant. Traffic on the site is decreasing.

For me personally, this is understandable, since many sites do not have robots.txt on their site at all and exist just fine.

Meta tags are missing - has no effect at all. How many experiments I have conducted with this, there is only one fact - no influence. I mean, there are no sanctions from Yandex.

But as for the Yandex Webmaster, the fact that your site does not have any designations does not entail any sanctions from Yandex.

Not used by robot Sitemap files.

There is essentially no site map. Don't pay attention to this, there are no sanctions for this.

In general, usually for owners of sites that are far from SEO, this is the situation in Webmaster:

But I’ll say, honestly, they don’t give a damn about it.

Let's start with my blog (site):

It is easy to understand that my blog does not need any physical address in St. Petersburg.

“The site is not optimized for mobile devices.”

This is actually NOT a wish, but a critical or even Fatal problem. The fact is that if your site is displayed crookedly for “mobile” users, then Behavioral factors the site will have very low ones.

Therefore, if such a problem is displayed in your Webmaster, then fix it urgently.

And in the end I will express my opinion about the work of the Yandex Webmaster:

Everything is very, very cloudy. There is no main signal - “Behavioral factors”. It was possible to make such a signal, and if your site has bad PF, then you can display this option and register - Improve your site.

And so almost all signals are not problematic.

Well, why publish that the site does not have robots, a host in robots and a site map, when in fact this does not play any role for the site?! Or maybe a site user just dreams of looking into Robots?!

Need a signal: Text overspam and Behavioral Factors Indicator.

Write your wishes about what sanctions signals you would like to see in Yandex.Webmaster. I will try to transfer this list to Yandex.

In July, a new website created on WordPress went into promotion. While the site was being audited, all indexed pages were excluded from Yandex search. Why? I found the answer in the Yandex webmaster panel. Look at Exclamation point in the red triangle.

As it turned out, there was one fatal error, which caused the entire site to be excluded from the search. The site seemed like a doorway to Yandex.

The problem turned out to be that Yandex considered the site a doorway. Why? After all, there were no external links on the site. The pages that were supposed to load were loading.

It turns out that Yandex considers a site a doorway not only when it redirects to other sites. But even when there are too many redirects inside the site itself. Where could the redirects come from? The answer was also found in the Yandex Webmaster panel.

As it turned out, WordPress generates duplicate pages and redirects from them to CNC pages

After correcting the errors, this will be a separate post, the I FIXED EVERYTHING button was pressed. You can press this button again only after 30 days. Therefore, I advise you to carefully check your site, which was considered a doorway, correct all errors, and only after that you can safely send the resource for verification.

On August 10, information appeared in the webmaster’s panel that there were no fatal errors. Those. the site is no longer considered a doorway.

Well, a nice bonus - the site appeared in the search for some queries.

Since September 2017, the number of notifications in the Yandex Webmaster panel about a fatal error has sharply increased, and often sites that have nothing to do under the search conspiracy theory filter are subject to sanctions. What is this... where did the chieftain get his money and how to get rid of the filter? Let's start by diving into the depths of the problem:

Violations or security issues detected

The root cause of the sanctions

Over the past years, Platon Shchukin and Co. have repeatedly organized St. Bartholomew's Night for webmasters. It all started with a struggle with links and over time grew into something more that required immersion in the basics of the business.

Yandex is a commercial company and shareholders want, at best, to make a profit, and at worst, to see innovations from management. The best case was closely intertwined with the worst, and under the banner of the fight for the quality of search results, Yandex began to take 80% of the profits from website creators. Since commercial projects are richer, we started with them, convincingly explaining without using violence that Direct is good for business.

Links have gone into oblivion by 90%, commerce with its head bowed low has gone to Direct and the time has come for information sites. It will not be possible to attract them into contextual advertising en masse, but the holes in the budget must be closed, if not with profit, then with activity (read above). The massive appearance of a fatal error in the panel indicates that the search results are being cleaned up. What's the profit here? It's simple - sites with small and medium traffic are being cut down, they are being replaced by flawed portals likefb.ru, who themselves eat from Direct’s table and feed him.

Formal cause of fatal error

Yasha’s ranking algorithms take into account thousands of different factors, so there will always be a cockroach outside the door that the site owner did not manage to kill with a slipper. Bots scurry around sites and if the resource does not have a roof in the form of high traffic and Direct advertising, then the resource receives a fatal error.

Remember “if only there were a person, there would be an article”? Yandex uses the saying 100%, adding only the twist “stranger”.

So, a fatal error appears in 90% of cases due to:

1. Google ads in the first window,
2. Large % of pages with a small amount of information,
3. Webmaster's life karma,
4. Just.

If you saw in the panel:

The site's position in search results has been lowered

Then the sad clown came to your street.

Signs of sanctions are a drop in traffic by 40-80% and a rollback of positions by 20-30 places in the search depth.

We are being treated

It’s hard to be treated if the doctor came up with a diagnosis for you on the fly, but life requires a heartbeat, so you have to try to get rid of Yasha’s fatality. Here is a list of actions that can help with sanctions:

1. Shooting advertising from the first screen,
2. Removing or disallowing small pages (of little use),
3. Formatting large but casual pages,
4. Healthy sleep.

In 2 cases out of 5, the error disappears when the site is resubmitted for verification without any further action. In another case, filming advertising helps. At the end of October 2017, I can’t say what will help in the 2 remaining cases, perhaps Yandex itself will understand that if you cut down the forest like this, you will soon have to live among the stumps and will roll back the sanctions, restoring hope to the webmaster.

I also advise you not to be sad if you make a fatal mistake, because life is much broader than the loss of a third of your traffic and the mark of a sanctioner on your forehead.

This section contains solutions to common problems in the “Fatal” category, identified during site diagnostics in Yandex.Webmaster. Problems in this category lead to the exclusion of individual pages or an entire site from search results.

The main page of the site returns an error

If you receive this message, do the following:

After making changes, wait until the next robot visit. You can also send the page for crawling - the robot will crawl it within two weeks.

If, as a result of the scan, the page responds with code 200 OK and there are no problems with content availability, then the warning in Yandex.Webmaster will disappear within a few days.

Failed to connect to server due to DNS error

Once a day, the indexing robot contacts DNS servers to determine the IP address of the server on which the site is located. If DNS records are configured incorrectly on a site, the robot does not receive the site's IP address. Therefore, the site cannot be indexed and added to search results.

Check the correctness of the server's response to the indexing robot. If the site is still unavailable, contact your hosting provider to adjust your domain's DNS records. When access to the site appears, the information in Yandex.Webmaster will be updated within a few days.

The problem with accessing the site may be short-lived. If you re-check the server response and no errors are found, wait for the information to be updated in the Webmaster; this should happen within a few days.

If Domain name was not renewed on time, the site becomes unavailable for indexing. Renew your domain registration. After this, the message in Yandex.Webmaster will disappear within a few days.

The site is closed for indexing in the robots.txt file

Several times a day, the indexing robot requests the robots.txt file and updates information about it in its database. If during the next call the robot received a prohibiting directive, a corresponding warning appears in Yandex.Webmaster.

Check the contents of the robots.txt file. If the ban is still present, remove it from the file. If you can't do this yourself, contact your hosting provider or domain name registrar. After the ban is lifted, the data in Yandex.Webmaster is updated within a few days.

If the domain name was not renewed on time, the robots.txt file will contain disallowing directives for the robot. Renew your domain registration. After this, the message in Yandex.Webmaster will disappear within a few days.

Violations or security issues detected

If a search rule violation is found If a security threat is found

On the page Diagnostics → Security and violations do the following:

When you solve the problem:

Verify that the problem is resolved. If the service detects a threat again during the scan, you will be able to report its elimination only after a month. Further this period will increase and may reach three months.

In the Yandex.Webmaster interface on the page Diagnostics → Security and violations Click the I fixed it button. This will give additional signal Yandex algorithms that the site needs to be rechecked. If the review is completed successfully, the restrictions will be lifted over time and information about violations will no longer be displayed.

The article is aimed primarily at website owners and marketers who want to understand global fatal errors that are generally associated with the entire site. If something like this happens, it immediately affects the entire site and often very, very badly.

• Site audit and problem monitoring.
• Briefly about how the search works.
• What problems might the whole site have with ranking?

Site audit and problem monitoring

When we understand any auditing or monitoring tool, we must understand how the tool works and where it gets its data from. It is clear that if we are talking about some kind of one-time site audit that we conduct, we are talking about searching for global problems that exist at the moment.

If we are talking about constant monitoring of the site, then we are talking about the fact that at some point everything may be fine with the site, and then something happens. For example, they posted new version with a bunch of 404 errors or a bunch of duplicates, or erased robots.txt, it could be anything, and we need to monitor and understand this moment in real time.

The sources of data for our monitoring can be very, very different, and, in fact, the monitoring tools themselves can also be different. For example, we will monitor the usual behavior of users through some kind of counters, such as Metrica, and the presentation of the site in search, if we are talking about Yandex in particular, then most likely it is Yandex. Webmaster.

Yandex.Webmaster data is the data that the search has. You can see your site as the site owner, consider it the best, the most excellent, and all your pages can load in your browser, even for your developers they can load for some users.

But this does not mean that the search sees them in the same way, that they are loaded by the search, that they are available for indexing, etc. Therefore, the data that the search has, which is given, in particular, in Yandex.Webmaster, is the data that is truly of real value, because it is the primary source data.

Site diagnostics

If suddenly you are the owner of a website or a marketer, then I would like to draw your attention to the fact that Webmaster has a website diagnostic tool that allows you to understand whether everything is in order with your website in general and at the present time. Here on the slide you can see the errors that are generally output in this tool.

• Fatal problems: the site is closed for indexing in robots.txt, home page the site returns an error, violations or security problems have been detected...
• Critical problems: a large number of broken internal links, long server response...
• Possible problems: errors found in Sitemap files, a large number of duplicate pages, the Host directive is not specified in the robots.txt file, there are no