In February, around the 19th, Yandex Webmaster Tools introduced a new status – “Low-value or low-demand page”.
As stated in the Yandex Support documentation:
The algorithm may not include a page in the search if it has little chance of being in demand by users. This can happen, for example, if the page duplicates pages already known to the robot, does not contain content, or its content does not quite correspond to user requests. This is an automatic, regular process, so the algorithm’s decision to include a specific page in the search may change.
So, what happens if you have pages (you deem to be high value) and they’ve fallen into this exclusion category with Yandex?
Why does Yandex consider a page to be low-value?
A page can be considered of little value if it is a duplicate or does not contain content visible to the robot. Content may not be visible to due how the content is being served (JavaScript), how content is presented in the DOM, or if there is an issue crawling the page.
Some potential issues/fixes can be:
- Check the content of the page and its availability to the robot:
- Are the titles of the page ( title , h1 , h2 , etc.) correct, do they describe its content well.
- Is there any important content that is given as an image.
- Whether the important content of the page is being rendered by JS scripts. Check the server response to see the HTML of the page as the robot is receiving it.
- Is an iframe being used to display content.
If the page is of no value, as in you know it’s bad – like a weird blog tag, you should:
- If the page duplicates the content of other pages on the site, use the rel=”canonical” directive to specify the original page, or specify insignificant GET parameters in the Clean-param statement in robots.txt .
- You can also prevent the page from being indexed by a redirect with a 301 HTTP code, robots.txt instructions , a meta tag, or an HTTP noindex header .
- If the page is technical in nature and does not contain useful content, prevent the page from indexing with the Disallow directive in robots.txt , a meta tag, or an HTTP noindex header .
Why does Yandex consider a page to be low-demand?
The Yandex robot checks how much the content of the page is in demand by users.
The algorithm evaluates each page to see if it will be shown on queries in those positions where the user can find it.
If the page contains no errors in the HTML code, contains content, but there are no users in the search and no queries to which it could answer, the page may be excluded from the search as not in demand.
- If some pages have content, but are excluded from the search, pay attention to their content. Content may not be responding to user requests. In this case, change it to better suit your user interests.
- Try to put yourself in the shoes of potential visitors to your site. How would you try to find information on this topic, how would you formulate a request? To find relevant topics, use the Word Search service , as well as the Search Query Statistics pages in the Webmaster, Group Management, and Featured Queries.
It is worth noting that Yandex does not have quotas on the number of pages to be indexed. Any number of pages that the algorithm recognizes as useful to users will be indexed.
