A summary of the YandexBot Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the YandexBot robot? Is it a good or a bad robot? And why is it visiting your website?
Shown below is a sample log file entry for the YandexBot web robot. It’s derived from an Apache web server log file. From the log entry information about how the robot identifies itself, HTTP User Agent, and where it is hosted are given.
Server Log File
vntweb.co.uk 5.45.207.28 - - [30/Apr/2019:00:43:33 +0100] "GET /html-marquee-tag/ HTTP/1.1" 200 8442 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)"
HTTP User Agent
YandexBot/3.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 5.45.207.28.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| inetnum: | 5.45.207.0 – 5.45.207.255 |
| netname: | YANDEX-5-45-207 |
| address: | Yandex LLC |
| address: | 16, Leo Tolstoy St. |
| address: | 119021 |
| address: | Moscow |
| address: | Russian Federation |
| last-modified: | 2018-08-03T07:15:46Z |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Yandex LLC.
Owner
Yandex LLC
Country
Russian Federation
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://yandex.com/bots. On the menu at the left there is a link to using robots.txt where information is given about configuring for the Yandex bots and specific information for each of them.
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The Yandex website provides details about how their robot complies with the robots.txt exclusion standard, which was described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt, but is not currently available. Information is available on the same website https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and also on the w3c website at https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1.
Details are given about both preventing the robot from indexing the website and how to adjust its crawl rate.
Their advice is to include the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent YandexBot from visiting your site
User-agent: YandexBot Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of YandexBot visiting your site, setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests can be set with the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: YandexBot Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example the delay has been set to 10 seconds.
As is common with website crawlers there is a delay between changes made to the robots.txt file and the change being implemented.
Take care making changes to the robots.txt file. A misunderstanding in configuration or an error in configuration can lead to important search engines excluding your website.
Further Info
Yandex is one of the Internet’s robots. It is associated with the Russian search engine of the same name.
Yandex is Russia’s most popular search engines, and one of the largest Internet companies in Europe.
Yandex has a number of pages providing information about their bot. This page is a good place to start http://help.yandex.com/search/
