An SEO text, in Yandex’s definition, is text written for the indexing bot rather than the reader. The violation is not about length or keyword frequency in isolation — it is about who the text was written for.
What counts as a violation
- Keyword stuffing — long lists of search queries, or incoherent text loaded with keywords.
- Over-optimisation — verbose wording that inflates the word count without addressing what the reader came for. This is the category that catches legitimate businesses: nobody set out to spam, they were told the page needed “at least 1,500 words”.
- Hidden text — keywords visible to the robot and not to the user: white on white, microscopic font sizes,
display: none, or text pushed outside the visible area.
Yandex specifically names the places these usually sit: text blocks at the foot of category pages, tag clouds, navigation elements and control elements.
What is explicitly not a violation
- A moderate tag cloud used for genuine navigation.
- Repetition dictated by the nature of the content — menus, catalogues, price lists.
- Text types where repetition is a linguistic norm: standards, instructions, legal documents.
- Truncated text, provided the hidden part can be expanded. A “read more” control is a usability decision, not concealment.
That last point is the practical dividing line for hidden text. Content behind an accordion the user can open is fine. Content the user can never reach is not.
How to stay on the right side of it
The test Yandex offers is the honest one: was this written primarily for people? A category page that opens with the products and carries a short, genuinely informative introduction passes. The same page with nine hundred words of throat-clearing beneath the fold, added because a checklist demanded a word count, is precisely what this violation describes.
Fixing an existing site
Removal is usually better than rewriting. Text added purely for search rarely has a reader to disappoint, and cutting it improves the page for everyone. Where the block does serve a purpose — a genuine explanation, a buying guide — move it to where a reader would want it and cut it to what a reader would actually read.
Biz bunu nasıl uyguluyoruz
This is the violation we most often find on sites that believe they have done everything right, because the offending text was added on somebody’s SEO advice. We remove it rather than rewrite it, and in eighteen months of doing that we have never seen rankings fall as a result. The block below the fold that nobody reads is not carrying the page; it is putting it at risk.
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