The Riddle of Mr. X: What is Yandex's ICS

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In the relatively recent past — before 2018 — one of the key indicators for ranking sites in Yandex was the TIC, or thematic citation index. At that time, the search engine paid attention to the number of links that lead users to the resource from other sites.

Cunning website owners were not shy about artificial cheating, and this had a negative impact on ranking. Yandex decided that it was enough to tolerate this and abandoned TIC. This is how IKS appeared - the site quality index. We will tell you what this indicator is, what factors its value depends on and what it means for a web resource.

What is ICS according to Yandex
According to Yandex developers, the site quality index is an indicator that reflects how useful the resource is for users. When calculating the IKS, the search engine relies on data from its own services and takes into account:

audience size;
user satisfaction level;
the degree of trust in the site from both the audience and Yandex itself;
other criteria.
Note that the ICS indicators for subdomains and main domains are equal to each other.

Yandex regularly recalculates the site quality index. The owner of the web resource can set up notifications to monitor the dynamics of the IKS.

When calculating the index, Yandex relies on the following principles:

From the point of view of the algorithm for determining the IKS, all web resources are equal.
The search engine has the right to change the algorithm for calculating the IKS at any time without sending additional notifications to site owners.
Yandex may reset the index if violations are detected on the site or if unauthorized attempts azerbaijan whatsapp data to influence the indicator are detected.
There is no information on what the recovery time of the IKS depends on. At least, Yandex itself does not give any comments.

When there is no data on recovery times

*When there is no data on recovery times

What influences the ICS - in theory and practice
Theoretically, the website quality index is influenced by:

resource traffic;
Site CTR in search;
the amount of content useful to users;
time and depth of page views;
return to search results;
number of indexed pages;
the number of links that come from other authoritative sources.
Now let's see what practitioners say.

Some experts claim that the main thing is organic traffic, if the number of unique users per month exceeds 15 thousand. Behavioral factors also affect the IKS, but not so significantly. The same applies to the reputation of the resource on the network. As for the user experience and the technical part of the site, experts see a weak correlation here.

Supporters of the other approach hold the opposite point of view. In their opinion, the main role is played by the technical side of the site, as well as the quality of internal optimization. The absence of errors, well-developed layout, resource availability - this is an important basis for SEO. In addition, when calculating the IKS, Yandex takes into account behavioral and commercial factors.

How to find out your IKS and your competitors'
You can find out what index a web resource currently has in Yandex Webmaster - on the "My Sites" page. There is another way. You can go to Webmaster, open the "Site Quality" page and go to "Quality Indicators". Information about competitors' IKS is also posted here.

Photo webmaster
If you need to regularly monitor the performance of several sites at once, you can install a special plugin. For example, the RDS Bar browser extension allows you to track metrics in the toolbar.

What is considered high ICS?
Bad, good, low, high - all this is very relative. The index value can vary from 0 to several tens of thousands. It would seem that everything is simple: the higher the IKS, the more advantageous the site looks in the eyes of Yandex. However, the quality index is just one of the factors that influence the position of the resource in the search results.

To decide whether the ICS can be considered low or high, you need to analyze the context - compare your site with other sites, take into account the level of competition, the specifics of the niche and other factors.

New web resources that do not yet have a history of interaction with users receive an index equal to zero. In addition, when sanctions are imposed by Yandex, the IKS also drops to zero.

In other cases, we recommend comparing the quality index of your site with competitors in your niche. What indicators can you focus on:

For a small commercial resource, a normal IKS is considered to be from 10 to 100.
For a standard average site with good traffic, the optimal index is from 100 to 1,000.
Large marketplaces and media portals can count on an IKS from 10,000 to 70,000.