I recently pushed a sitemap update with ~3000 new pages using the structure /en/blog/....
However, Yandex Webmaster decided to ignore the /en prefix entirely, trying to crawl /blog/... instead. This resulted in thousands of potential crawl errors.
The Savior: Luckily, I had proactive 308 redirects already configured. Instead of hitting a 404 wall, the bots were seamlessly redirected to the correct location.
Key Takeaways:
- ✅ Never assume search engines will parse your
sitemap.xmlperfectly. - ✅ Set up redirects before you need them. They are your safety net against traffic loss and indexing penalties.