Yandex SQI Checker

In Yandex's official documentation (they are the ones who developed and use the Site Quality Index), the SQI is defined as an indicator of a site's usefulness to search users. In most cases, it characterizes or takes into account the size of the site's audience.

Competitors with a higher SQI value have more pages in their website structure, as well as higher engagement, trust, and user satisfaction levels from Yandex. Other criteria, such as pageview depth, average page load speed, the presence of backlinks to the site's pages, content plagiarism ratings, errors from the site's technical audit, and the average number of characters in the text, do not correlate with SQI value.

Nothing. The SQI serves as an indicator of how useful your website is to Yandex users and whether it's more relevant to you, including when analyzing your competitors. There's no mention of it being a ranking factor (as the Thematic Citation Index (TIC) once was).

It's all individual. Look at the SQI of your direct competitors with good visibility in Yandex; that's the value you should strive for. Of course, increasing the SQI shouldn't be a KPI for your SEO specialist: after all, increasing targeted search traffic to your website is far more important than dubious search engine metrics.

First of all, don't panic: the SQI is regularly recalculated and the formula for its calculation can change, so it's possible that nothing has changed on your website.

However, it's worth making sure that any useful pages (or groups of pages) that previously generated search traffic in Yandex have not been removed from the site recently.

No, but not always. For example, for translate.google.com, its value is several times lower than for google.com. However, most often, the subdomain's SQI is equal to the domain's SQI. If there is a difference in the SQI value, a search analysis of the website and subdomain typically reveals that the subdomain was intentionally detached from the main website. This can be requested through Yandex support.

Based on our observations, the search quality index changes no more than once every 1-2 months. Yandex representatives claim that the quality index is calculated monthly.

The SQI value may increase due to the launch of contextual advertising in Yandex search, increased brand awareness, and website search engine optimization. We use Yandex data to calculate this value.

The problem is either that the SQI has not been recalculated for your site, or that the changes have had an impact on it, but not enough for you to notice the changes.

It's important to understand that the displayed SQI value changes in increments of 10. So, if your actual SQI was 4, but as a result of site work it increased to 9, it will still be 0 in Yandex Webmaster.