The most important indicator of the site is the citation index.

To every owner of the site, I would like his Internet resource to be popular among users, characterized by high attendance and authority among themselves. With the exception of highly specialized Internet resources created for a limited number of people, all sites gain popularity among users at the expense of search systems, into which requests are entered. With the growth in the number of resources in the Global Network, the number of similar resources containing similar content has grown and offering users information corresponding to the same search queries. Why are some resources very popular and bring huge profits to their creators, and other sites of the same subject can not form a significant audience and sooner or later go into oblivion? How do search engines perform the gradation of resources in terms of the degree of interest and usefulness for the user?

It should be noted that to date, search engines have turned into the most complex systems, working on certain algorithms and allocating certain resources depending on certain indicators, knowing which, it is possible to facilitate the task of determining the aspect of the popularity of the resource. One such indicator is the citation index.

The citation index is an indicator that is taken into account by the search engine when allocating seats in the SERP. This indicator is calculated based on the number of links that lead to this resource from other pages hosted on the Global Network. The simplest version of the citation index assumes that only the quantitative index of links to the site is taken into account. The notion of a thematic index of citation also assumes consideration by the search engine of subjects of sites that refer to the estimated resource. There is also a citation index, called weighted - in this case, the popularity of referring resources is also taken into account, which in turn is also calculated on the basis of the citation index.

At the initial stage of the development of the Internet and before the widespread introduction of search engine optimizers, the citation index was characterized by the ability to really reflect the popularity of a resource located on the Global Network. Today, this indicator can be increased artificially as a result of a number of actions aimed at optimizing the resource to attract the attention of search engines.

As for the most popular search engine in Runet - Yandex, then the thematic index of citing is one of the main criteria according to which the search engine evaluates the "importance" of the pages. Representatives of Yandex have repeatedly stated that their TCI determines the level of "authority" of Internet sites, given the qualitative characteristics of links to them from other resources. The calculation of TCI is accompanied by an analysis of not only the total number of sites referring to the estimated resource, but also their qualitative level - authority and own weight.

In order to find out the relation of the search engine to your own resource, you need to know the index of citing the site. In order to test Yandex, you can use several methods. First, you should find the site in the Yandex resource directory. You can do this only if the resource is registered there. After the site is found, information about the TIC of its main page becomes available - these data are always present near the description of the resource. It is worth noting that all the resources placed in each directory of the catalog are graded exactly in accordance with the TIC indicator. That is, the smaller the index of the ITC is characterized by the site, the lower it will be located in the catalog. The second way to find the citation index involves the installation of a special browser extension - Yandex.Bar, among the functions of which there is the ability to display the TCI of the currently viewed site.