YandexSearchShop bot

What is YandexSearchShop?

YandexSearchShop is a web crawler operated by Yandex, Russia's largest search engine company. This bot is part of Yandex's search engine infrastructure, designed to discover, analyze, and index content from online shopping sites and e-commerce platforms. Yandex operates a range of specialized crawlers, and YandexSearchShop specifically focuses on product listings, prices, and shopping-related content. The bot helps power Yandex's shopping search features, similar to Google Shopping or Bing Shopping.

The crawler identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexSearchShop/3.0; +https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/robot-workings/check-yandex-robots.html). This follows Yandex's standard bot naming convention, where specialized bots have descriptive names indicating their function.

Like other Yandex crawlers, YandexSearchShop likely uses sophisticated algorithms to determine crawling frequency and depth based on the site's importance, content update frequency, and relevance to Yandex users. It's designed to respect standard crawling protocols and server resources while collecting the data needed to maintain Yandex's shopping search index.

Why is YandexSearchShop crawling my site?

If YandexSearchShop is crawling your website, it's most likely because your site contains product listings, e-commerce functionality, or shopping-related content that Yandex wants to include in its shopping search results. The bot is specifically looking for product information, including names, descriptions, prices, availability, images, and other attributes that would be relevant to shoppers using Yandex's search services.

The frequency of visits depends on several factors, including your site's popularity in Russia and Russian-speaking regions, how often your content changes, and the overall importance of your site in Yandex's index. E-commerce sites with frequently changing inventory or prices may experience more regular crawling.

This crawling is generally considered authorized as part of the normal functioning of search engines, provided you haven't explicitly blocked Yandex bots in your robots.txt file or through other means. Yandex, like other major search engines, follows the standard robots exclusion protocol.

What is the purpose of YandexSearchShop?

YandexSearchShop exists to gather product information from across the web to power Yandex's shopping search features. This specialized crawler focuses on collecting structured data about products, prices, and shopping-related information, which Yandex then processes, indexes, and makes available to users searching for products on their platform.

The data collected helps Yandex create comprehensive shopping search results that allow users to compare products, prices, and availability across multiple retailers. This specialized focus on e-commerce content enables Yandex to provide more relevant results for shopping-related queries compared to what their general web crawler might gather.

For website owners, particularly those running e-commerce sites, being indexed by YandexSearchShop can provide visibility to potential customers using Yandex's shopping search features, especially in Russia and other regions where Yandex has significant market share. This can potentially drive traffic and sales from users specifically looking for products like those offered on your site.

How do I block YandexSearchShop?

Yandex crawlers, including YandexSearchShop, respect the standard robots.txt protocol. If you wish to control or block this bot from crawling your site, you can add specific directives to your robots.txt file. To block YandexSearchShop specifically while allowing other Yandex bots, add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: YandexSearchShop
Disallow: /

If you want to block all Yandex bots, you can use:

User-agent: Yandex
Disallow: /

You can also use more granular controls to block access to specific sections of your site while allowing the bot to crawl others:

User-agent: YandexSearchShop
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /members/
Allow: /

Blocking YandexSearchShop will remove your products from Yandex's shopping search results, which might reduce visibility to potential customers using Yandex as their search engine, particularly in Russia and other countries where Yandex has significant market share. Before blocking, consider whether the potential traffic from Yandex users searching for products like yours would be valuable for your business.

If you're experiencing excessive crawling that impacts server performance, rather than blocking entirely, you might consider using the Crawl-delay directive, which Yandex respects:

User-agent: YandexSearchShop
Crawl-delay: 10

This tells the bot to wait at least 10 seconds between requests, reducing the load on your server.