Yandex Makes Changes to the Indexing of AJAX Sites

Yandex announced changes in the bypass of AJAX sites by robots. Now, instead of checking HTML versions of pages, robots will execute scripts on AJAX sites.

Pages with #! are no longer supported. In order for the content of the site not to disappear from the search results, you must: 

  • Change the structure of links in the sitemap so that their content does not contain the # symbol
  • Set up 301 redirects on pages that are important for the state of the site to new ones with correct addresses (namely, without the #! parameter ). In this case, redirection must be configured both from pages to addresses like http://www.example.com/?_escaped_fragment_=blog , and from pages http://www.example.com/#!blog . 

Pages tagged with meta name=”fragment” content=”!” will also be discontinued soon. But in this case, no additional settings are needed to save the content: the meta tag will be ignored, and the original page will be indexed with JavaScript execution.  

Dan Taylor
Dan Taylor is an experienced SEO consultant and has worked with brands and companies on optimizing for Russia (and Yandex) for a number of years. Winner of the inaugural 2018 TechSEO Boost competition, webmaster at HreflangChecker.com and Sloth.Cloud, and founder of RussianSearchNews.com.