The Thematic Citation Index (тИЦ) was Yandex's long-running public metric estimating a site's authority from the number and thematic weight of links pointing to it — loosely analogous to the old public PageRank.
Definition
The Thematic Citation Index (тИЦ) was Yandex's long-running public metric estimating a site's authority from the number and thematic weight of links pointing to it — loosely analogous to the old public PageRank. Because it was visible and simple, тИЦ became the main pricing currency on Russian link exchanges: a donor site's тИЦ set the price of a link from it.
Yandex retired тИЦ in 2018 and replaced it with ИКС (Index of Site Quality / "Индекс качества сайта"), a broader score that factors in audience size, user behaviour, service quality and trust signals — not just links. The change was deliberate: it removed the single link-based number that the paid-link economy was built around and replaced it with something harder to game and more reflective of real user value.
In context
For iGaming SEO on Runet, the тИЦ-to-ИКС shift is a useful history lesson that still shapes practice. The era when you could buy rankings by acquiring links from high-тИЦ donors is over: ИКС does not respond to link volume the same way, Yandex's AGS and link-spam systems actively devalue link-selling networks, and the metric now reflects things a paid link cannot buy — a real audience, good engagement, and trust.
Practically, ИКС is worth watching in Yandex Webmaster as a directional health indicator, but it is an outcome, not a lever: it rises when the site genuinely attracts and satisfies an audience, and there is no clean way to inflate it directly. Affiliates evaluating a potential partner or link source can glance at ИКС as one signal among many, but should weight real traffic, topical relevance and editorial standards far more heavily.
The strategic takeaway is that Yandex, like Google, has moved authority measurement away from a countable link metric toward user-value signals, so the winning approach is to build an audience rather than a link profile.
Worked example
An affiliate evaluating three potential content-partnership sites checks ИКС but relies mainly on real Yandex and Google traffic estimates, topical fit and whether the site publishes original editorial work. The highest-ИКС candidate turns out to be a link-heavy directory with thin content and is passed over for a smaller site with a genuine readership in the betting niche.
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