Yandex's quirk is that when a site moves to HTTPS, they change their whole shopping list retroactively

Well in effect, Bing does that too. AFAIK only Google lets you keep the old data.

Difficult to know about the other SEs since only the big 3 offer webmaster accounts.

Oh, I never thought to check their webmaster tools. I was talking about crawling. Which I guess means I've never formally told them that suchandsuch site is now https.

bingbot's requests for moved/deleted content remain strictly on the http side. I just re-checked. But again, I don't think I've ever added the https version.

You don't need to do anything to Yandex or Bing. It will take a few days but the new secure paths will start to populate on their own. This will show in their webmaster tools index section.

Of course resubmitting an updated sitemap.xml speeds up this process for all the SEs. The sites I switched with sitemaps updated faster and more complete (all the pages) than those who did not have a sitemap file.

This is the site that changed in May. I keep track of all redirects, whether to a different site or from http to https. To date, only the YandexBot has made requests in the form https://example.com/oldurl; they started doing this almost right away.

Anyway, I'm glad this came up because I just visited Yandex and it turns out that when I wasn't looking, my verification for any and all sites had fallen off the map. They still seem to know I exist, though. That is, I've got a WMT account with assorted unread mail--and no sites listed.

I'm glad Yandex has a WMT. It shows they're a player with respect to site owners. That's a good thing. They have a good size operation in Palo Alto so they've established a presence in the US, but they've got some work to do.

Some of their tools are awkward for English speakers. Only about half the tools in WMT translate automatically. Also, they stress a couple odd standards that other SEs do not support.

Example: Yandex will show an error for not using a Host directive in robots.txt. This is a widely *unsupported* directive (use it and Google will error) to determine the Main site when using a mirror. Mirror sites haven't been used for many years and can even cause a duplicate content penalty at other SEs... yet Yandex requires this directive when validating robots.txt even if you don't use a mirror.

There are a couple other oddities like this with Yandex. Still, they send me a trickle of traffic every day so I shouldn't find fault... of course I just did :)

Yeah, one of my unread messages contained the allegation that the "description" meta on many pages is missing or invalid, which is a barefaced ... er ... untruth, since it's part of my generic page-creation template. Unfortunately the "site diagnostics checklist" leads only to a fresh login--in Russian.

:: pause to investigate ::

Oh, dear. Oh, dear. It is not, after all, untrue. Certain pages--mainly obscure older ones, but a few currently active--do not, in fact, contain a meta description. Why the ### has That Other Search Engine never bothered to point this out?

:: wandering off to construct multi-file search that will bring all offenders to the surface ::