In a webmaster blog post today, Yandex has announced that broken links can now be downloaded from Yandex Webmaster Tools so that Webmasters can better manage the process of repairing them.
To work effectively with optimizing your site, you must constantly monitor broken internal links. You can quickly track the appearance of such links in the Webmaster (Links – internal links ). For your convenience, broken internal links can not only be viewed, but also downloaded as an archive.
Oftentimes those responsible within an organization for fixing broken internal links on a website aren’t directly involved in the SEO, and through internal processes they, more often than not, don’t work directly from the Yandex Webmasters UI – so being able to download these links and distribute through internal project management tools is extremely useful.
A link can be considered broken if there is a mistake in the address (URL) of the page, the URL of the page has changed, or the page does not exist.
So does this mean that broken internal links can affect your rankings and performance within Yandex search? I’d say not based on the rationale provided in the blog post:
we recommend that you correct them as soon as possible, as they negatively impact your user experience and reduce conversions
The post does then go on to say that most likely, these links are excluded from the Yandex index, but if the link is broken and not returning a 200 HTTP status code, the URL being excluded from the index isn’t necessarily a bad thing.