Introduction
Trust Flow and Citation Flow are two metrics that come from the company, Majestic SEO. Trust Flow in particular is a highly valued metric because it is the only one of the mainstream metrics that really focuses on trust, and of course it is well known that the Google ranking algorithm depends very highly on trust.
What is also rather different about these two metrics in particular however, as that unlike most other SEO metrics, it is not quite as straight forward as “higher is better”. The two metrics work together and there is a balance between them which is important to understand.
Understanding Trust Flow
Trust Flow is both a single metric which is listed for an entire domain, but it is also made up of individual values called Topical Trust Flow. This is best explained with an image.
Here I have put in the domain bethesda.net who are a publisher of many popular computer games such as the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. The large circle on the left is the overall trust flow score for the domain as a whole – currently 63 (which is an extremely good score!)
To the right of that we have 4 other data points and these show the topical trust flow of the top 4 categories that Majestic has determined this domain to be about. As you’ll see, all four of them fall into the Video Games category, which is accurate.
You can take a further dive into these topics by clicking that little ‘… more’ link in the top right. Here’s the full breakdown of the TTF for Bethesda:
Notice now that there is a much longer list of topics and some of them vary quite widely. However, notice that in this list we see the percentage that each of these categories is ranked.
In this case, the top 3 categories make up over 90% of the total score so the ones at the bottom of the list with a less than 1% contribution can be ignored.
How Does Majestic Determine These Topical Values?
Majestic calculates topical trust flow for a domain by analyzing the quality and relevance of its backlinks and categorizing these links according to specific topics or industries. It begins by crawling the web to gather data on backlinks, evaluating each one for quality and trustworthiness. These links are then classified into various topical categories based on the content of the referring domains and the nature of the links.
The individual trust flow scores within each topical category are then aggregated to determine how well a domain is trusted in specific areas. This breakdown provides insight into the domain’s strength and credibility across those topics or industries.
Where Does Citation Flow Fit In
Citation flow is really just an indication of the amount of backlinks that a particular domain has. In the very early days of SEO, a high number of backlinks was always a good thing but of course over the years Google has made countless changes to its algorithm to assess the quality of those links and having a lot of backlinks that are of low quality would do more harm than simply not having those backlinks at all.
How TF and CF Work Together
In simple terms think of it this way – if citation flow is a measure of the number of backlinks that a domain has, then trust flow is a measure of how trusted those links are, and this is where the balance becomes important and is often overlooked!
In the Bethesda example that we have been looking at, if you refer back to the first image, you’ll see that the TF is 63 and the CF is 52. This is actually an incredibly good sign because it is saying that not only does the domain have a very high number of links but that those links are highly trusted. It is actually much more common to find that the CF is higher than the TF and this can be a very valuable insight.
A Counter Example
Let me show you an example of a domain that I found which illustrates this perfectly.
Firstly, a CF of 49 is very high. If you were to take this metric on it’s own and you had the mindset of simple, ‘more is better’, you’d think this was a good score, but when we see a TF of only 9, we realise that the CF is almost 5 times as high as the TF!
What does this mean? In layman’s terms, the site has a huge number of backlinks pointing to it, but they are not very trustworthy links. Do you notice anything else? There’s only one category shown, and that is sports and yet if you look at the domain itself, you’ll see that it is about photography. Why would a photography site be getting a bunch of links from sports websites? It makes no sense and is of course highly unnatural.
Verifying Metrics With Other Tools
Personally, I never rely on one single metric or even just on a single tool to asses the strength of a domain. Each tool has it’s own way of working and almost any tool or metric can be manipulated to some degree. However, when multiple tools all show a similar story, you begin to get a more accurate picture.
I really like to use SEMRush as it has a metric called Authority Score which applies to a domain or at a particular subdomain or individual page. I’ll use the root domain here as that is also what I am using on Majestic. What I really like about SEMRush is that it is one of the more difficult metrics to fool and it is more difficult to get a higher score here. So what does SEMRush say about this particular domain?
First of all you can see at a glance the very high number of backlinks: 21,000 coming from almost 3,000 domains, and yet the overall authority score is a mere 7, which is extremely low. But SEMRush actually shows us lots more than that. Let’s look at how the domain is performing:
What this image clearly shows is that the domain did used to get plenty of traffic from ranking hundreds of keywords but that earlier on in the year, no doubt when Google caught up with them, their rankings and resulting traffic dropped to precisely 0 and have stayed there ever since! This domain has been penalised.
We can go even further with our analysis but this article is not about SEMRush, but about the Majestic trust flow and citation flow metrics so let’s get back to that now.
What’s The Ideal Balance Between Trust Flow and Citation Flow?
Think of it like a ratio – TF : CF. What we can do here is very simply divide the trust flow by the citation flow.
To show how this works with the two domains we have looked at:
bethesda.net – TF: 63 / CF 52 = 1.21
shotecamera.com – TF: 9 / CF: 49 = 0.02
The magic number here is 1.00. Meaning, a fairly equal balance between TF and CF with TF being the more important of the two values.
So if that formula brings back a score greater than 1, as it does with bethesda.net then you are looking at a very good domain in terms of trust, but it is below 1, then the closer to 0 it is, as it is in the example of shotecamera.com, the worse that domain is in terms of trust.
Putting All The Numbers Together
It’s not just about the balance of the two values, for the numbers themselves are important and this is where higher is indeed better. A site with 30/30 TF/CF is better than a site with 10/10 even though the ratios are the same.
What is really important here is the Trust Flow value, and the relevance of the Topical Trust Flow to the niche of the website itself – but the subject of topical relevance is a large one and definitely beyond the scope of this particular article!
So in conclusion then, you want to see a high TF score, but whatever the TF value is, you want the CF to be around the same or even a little lower. If the CF is much higher than the TF, that suggests a low quality backlink profile and further research into the domain would be warranted.