Yandex introduces a new method for assessing the popularity of sites (Topic)

Yandex has developed a new resource estimation technology for webmasters and owners of Internet sites. Now the main assessment criterion is a complex system characteristic that determines the level of demand for the site.

The metric is called " site quality index " (abbreviated - ICS). The ICS characteristic replaces the existing "thematic citation index" (TIC) and later will take its place in the Yandex.Webmaster service.

Internet is not the same

Interested parties will have the opportunity to determine the value of ICS for their resource and make a comparison with other indicators. The new algorithm is currently in beta testing and may be further improved.

TIC from Yandex appeared about 20 years ago (1999), and throughout the entire time determined the "authority" of Internet resources. The basis was the number and importance of links to the site from other platforms. Over the period of the TIC existence, the structure of the Internet itself has changed: social messengers and social networks have developed greatly, the number of mobile sites and mobile device users has grown.

SERP algorithms have also changed. Modern ranking is based on many different kinds of indicators. Links are no longer among the most important criteria for the quality of a resource that webmasters should be guided by, although it is premature to completely abandon this indicator.

Yandex specialists consider the existing method of generating resource quality metrics somewhat outdated. According to them, the importance of a particular site at the moment is more related to the interest of visitors to the web page, which determines its relevance. In the official message of the company it is said that the usefulness of a site is determined by how productively users can solve their problems with its help.

Behavior factors

The ICS system metric is determined based not only on the total number of visitors to a web page, but also on the level of trust in the resource. The latter is determined by analyzing the factors of user behavior.

Analysts refer to behavioral factors as all actions that users take on a particular resource. These include the period of stay on the site, the number of pages viewed, the implementation of clicks on links, the criterion for returning to the page, etc. User behavior is one of the main parameters that determine the formation of the final list of sites by modern search engines.

Not so long ago Yandex transferred the TIC metric from the Yandex.Katalog service to Yandex.Webmaster due to the closure of the first one. The audience of Yandex.Katalog decreased, and the company did not see further prospects for the development of the platform. Before that, the company stopped processing applications for adding sites to its "Catalog", the number of which on the service by that time was more than 115 thousand units.

Product from Google - analogue of TIC

A year before the appearance of the TIC, Google was among the first search engines to use the link ranking system. The new system led to more productive search results. The PageRank algorithm, authored by Larry Page (one of the founders of Google), named after its developer, determined a numerical value for a set of documents linked by links, thus determining the "authority" of a particular resource.

Later, other search engines have also implemented similar mechanisms. The last PageRank update was dated 2013, and three years later (2016) Google no longer used PageRank, officially dropping the indicator and resetting it to zero for all sites.

The Topic of Article: Yandex introduces a new method for assessing the popularity of sites.
Author: Jake Pinkman