I built a Next.js side project on weekends for a practical reason: I had a much bigger solo project coming up at work where SEO would be critical, and I did not want my first real SEO decisions to happen there.
I expected Google to be the main feedback loop. As soon as the side project went live, I set up Google Search Console. I almost ignored Yandex Webmaster completely because the site content was in English. A Russian search engine felt secondary. Still, mostly out of curiosity, I submitted the sitemap there too.
Two weeks later, the traffic numbers I was looking at were the opposite of what I expected:
- Google: 58 visitors
- Yandex: 200 visitors
That result caught my attention, but the traffic gap was not actually the most useful part of the experiment. Yandex was also indexing my pages noticeably faster and giving me more detailed error reports. Those reports helped me find and fix issues I probably would not have noticed otherwise.
What I was really trying to learn
I had already read about SEO. The missing part was experience with a real site: publishing pages, watching search engines discover them, seeing what entered the index, reading diagnostics, fixing mistakes, and then checking what changed.
The side project gave me a place to make those mistakes before the work project where SEO mattered much more. I was not trying to run a controlled benchmark of Google versus Yandex. I was trying to build the feedback loop that reading alone had not given me.
The bigger surprise was indexing and diagnostics
The 58-versus-200 comparison is memorable because it is a clean number. But one site over two weeks is not evidence that Yandex is generally “better” than Google, or that an English-language site should expect the same result.
What I can say from my own experience is narrower and more useful: during those first two weeks, Yandex sent more traffic to this project, indexed my pages faster, and gave me diagnostics that I found more actionable.
That changed how I think about webmaster tools. I now see them not only as places to check search traffic, but also as observability tools for search. A search engine can be useful before it becomes my largest traffic source if it exposes technical problems or indexing behavior that I would otherwise miss.
Crawling, indexing, and traffic are different signals
A crawler discovering or fetching a URL is not the same as that URL being indexed. An indexed page is not guaranteed to rank well. And ranking is still not the same as receiving traffic.
Google's own documentation separates Search into crawling, indexing, and serving results, and notes that a page is not guaranteed to be crawled, indexed, or shown just because it meets the technical requirements. Yandex Webmaster likewise exposes site diagnostics and indexing-related information as separate tools.
That distinction matters when looking at my numbers. 58 versus 200 was a traffic observation. Faster indexing was a separate observation. More useful diagnostics was another one. Compressing all three into “Yandex beat Google” would make the story simpler, but technically worse.
The workflow I would use again
- Connect more than one webmaster tool early. I nearly skipped Yandex because I assumed an English site made it irrelevant.
- Submit the sitemap and then watch what actually happens. Submission is not proof of indexing.
- Track indexing separately from traffic. If traffic changes, I want to know whether the difference starts with discovery, indexing, visibility in results, or something later.
- Treat diagnostics as leads, not verdicts. A warning tells me what to inspect; I still need to understand whether it matters.
- Keep the time window in the conclusion. My result was from the first two weeks of one side project.
What this experiment does not prove
I cannot use this test to claim that Yandex will index every site faster, that it will send more traffic to every English-language project, or that Google was doing something wrong. I also cannot turn a short correlation into an explanation for why the traffic differed. The data tells me what I observed, not the complete cause behind it.
That limitation matters in SEO. Two events can happen one after another without the first causing the second. Observing a change and explaining its cause are different jobs.
What changed for me
I almost ignored Yandex Webmaster because I had already decided, without evidence, that it would not matter for an English-language side project. Two weeks later, it had sent 200 visitors compared with 58 from Google, while also giving me faster indexing and more useful diagnostics in my case.
The traffic numbers got my attention. The better lesson was methodological: connect the tools, separate the signals, inspect the evidence, and keep conclusions no stronger than the data allows.
That is the kind of SEO experience I wanted before starting the larger project at work. Reading gave me terminology. Running a real site gave me feedback.