Today, Yandex have removed the Original Content (Authored texts) page from their Webmaster Support documentation. This was documented in an official Webmaster blog post yesterday, with the changes picked up by our monitoring tools today.
Previously located in Webmaster Support under the Site information dropdown, the page URL now returns a 404 error code.
https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/service/authored-texts.html
Unique content plays an important role in the development of a site by making it more attractive to users. Search algorithms also take into account the uniqueness of content: sites with original content may be ranked higher in the search results. However, site owners often borrow content on the internet. To let Yandex know that you’re going to post unique content, upload it to Yandex.Webmaster using the “Original texts” tool.
At the time of writing this post, the tool was still accessible via Webmaster Tools:
Removing References
The /tooltips page previously listed Original Content as a header (with text), but this has since been removed and the page re-jigged and previous sections updated.
Yandex have previously stated via the Original Content page that:
Content is considered original or unique if it has never been published online, including your site.
It could be possible that Yandex are updating and modernising the definition of, and changing how they process content and content changes.
For instance, if content was amended or changed, the Webmaster team advised site owners that minor amends would be picked up by the search algorithm, but larger changes (e.g. 500 characters) should be submitted as new texts:
If the changes are minor, the text can still be taken into account by the search algorithms. You don’t need to delete and add it again, as it won’t be considered to have never been published on the internet at the time you add it.
If you added one or more fragments larger than 500 characters to the text, upload them as separate texts.
The previous Webmaster support article also stated that:
- Text files should contain between 500 and 32,000 characters
- Text containing more characters should be divided into several parts and submitted separately
- The upload limit is 100 text (files) per calendar day
