As the power of PageRank is getting lower, flow metrics matter. Google gives a huge importance to metrics like domain authority, trust flow or citation flow as a ranking factor. These data are pretty hard to measure, that is why software has been developed by companies like Moz or Majestic, which are pretty good at analyzing links.
With Trust Flow or Citation Flow, it is easier for Google to rank a website depending on its quality, authority or trust.
Let’s see what is the difference between Majestic’s Citation Flow and Trust Flow and how they interact.
What is Citation Flow?
Citation Flow is a metric trademarked by Majestic that refers to the popularity of a link in a site without considering the quality of these links. The perfect example is porn sites. They have a very high Citation Flow but these links are often not qualitative. A website with a lot of links pointing to it will be influential and will get a good citation flow.
It is good to know that if Trust Flow increases, then Citation Flow should also increase. However, if Citation Flow increases, there is no proof that Trust Flow will increase too. So if a website with high Citation Flow flow points to your website, your Citation Flow should get a boost. But if websites with high Citation Flow but low Trust Flow link to your website, it will negatively impact your Trust Flow.
What is Trust Flow?
Trust Flow is a metric trademarked by Majestic that analyses how trustworthy a site is by measuring its quality. Quality is the essential data of this metric. If a link pointing to your website is authoritative and qualitative, then your trust flow will increase. A good trust flow is harder to get than a citation flow and so the Citation Flow will always get higher than the Trust Flow and not the contrary because there are a lot of links but not all of them are relevant. Moreover, even if you are developing a qualitative linking strategy, there are always directories or other sorts of backlinks that are not very qualitative pointing to your website.
In parallel, it seems like there is a direct correlation between trust flow and organic traffic. Indeed, if a site has a high trust flow, then it means it has a lot of qualitative backlinks and Google rewards qualitative backlinks. As a matter of fact, you will be ranked higher.
How they interact?
How to know which ratio is good to get between Citation Flow and Trust Flow? How to optimize the overall trust of a site? For instance if a Citation Flow is 20 and a Trust Flow 40 then the ratio is 1:2. The highest ratio is 0:9 even if Google has 98:99.
The best ratio seems to be 1. Average Trust to Citation Flow ratio should be 0.50. A high ratio will be delivered to an authoritative and trustworthy website. Like if the website has a Citation Flow much higher than a Trust Flow, there is no doubt that the website is hosting a bunch of low-quality links.
Ratio can go further than 1.
Look at abondance.com who has a TF of 54 and a CF of 46 => Ratio is 1,17.
[…] Majestic has developed a tool that measures the trust of a website linking to another trustworthy websites. If a link pointing to your website is authoritative and qualitative, then your trust flow will increase. To know more about trust flow, you can check our previous article. […]
[…] Majestic a développé un outil qui mesure la confiance d’un site web pointant vers un autre site de confiance. Si un lien pointant vers votre site est une autorité et de qualité, alors votre trust flow (ou flux de confiance) augmentera. Pour en savoir plus à propos du trust flow, vous pouvez lire ce précédent article. […]
I guess the more you link the more risk of CF higher than TF. sometime you cannot control who and whom link to your site. If a competitors want to ruined your site trust flow, he/she can just hire someone to link 1 million differ ip junk link to your root domain and this will definitely will increase your CF and make TF lower. which is not good,
as you mention Trust flow need to be higher than Citation flow. i have couple of sites with average 0.4 – 0.7 ratio, however there’s one site with less link and less exposure had a 1.4 ratio – http://www.newsflashing.com
but trying to rank a certain keyword in this site still not easy. my best guess linking still a ranking factor. although there’s some risk of lowering your trust flow when this started..the dilemma :)
Excellent article. If you search for the “Citation Flow” definition, you will notice that it is explained ineffectively, even in the Majestic’s website! Here, in this article, by the example of the porn websites which they are popular but not of quality.
Many thanks Emma!
Timely help rendered by this post. Just today afternoon somebody asked me this TF & CF data for my website and I didn’t know what it is, searched in Google and came across your post. Now the concept is clear. Thanks. Just a small query, my TF is 11 and CF is 33. How is the ratio ? Any problems here. Please advise me…
Your ratio is 11/33 = 0,333333.
Shaunak the way i understand it is that means you have a lot of links from not very trustworthy sites.
My Question; if a site has a high trust flow eg. 30 and a Citation flow of 16 is this a bad thing?
Does this mean the website does not have a lot of links, but the ones they do have are from quality sites?
I think there is a danger in putting to much stock into a lot of these reporting tools. Sure it can give you a general flavour, but at best its a guess on an approximation. And it can only look at historic data.
So in other words if a site was generally at a ‘low quality level’, you might be tempted to try and cull it, but thats on the basis its quality never changes. One post on trend or highly relevant might see its inbound impact drastic change your sites SERP’s.
Generally I like to get the on page as sound as possible, try and dilute the inbound text anchors where ever possible and only cut ties if the domain is unlikely ever to be good. (I,e, porn sites.)
Dear Emma ! I have a question. How to check the trustrank of a website?
DOES HIGHER CITATION FLOW AND TRUST FLOW INCREASE PAGE RANKING? OR IS IT BETTER TO HAVE HIGHER DOMAIN AUTHORITY?
Can you please tell me the minimum trustrank of standard website ?
Great post Emma!
At first i didnt kow what is citation flow and i think now the first thing i am going to do is to increase the blog citation flow then trust flow will follow this.
Many thanks Emma!
Well, but how can I increase Trust Flow? My CF and TF ratio is 0.44
Dear Emma ! I have a question. How to check the trust link of a website?
Thank you for this article, very helpful! :)
My CF and TF ratio is 0.4 . How can increase the trust flow? I wish you had written more about that
Would like to find out how these Majestic measurements compare to the Moz measurements of domain & page authority. Is there a relationship between the ways each company determines its ratings? Are any more important than the others and thus you would recommend focusing on it? Thanks for this article!
I might have to invest more time into my blog then to build it’s trust, even if I share consistent articles and get social interaction, looks like backlinks are very important to build a strong authority.
Great Blog really helpful to me in understand the citation flow and trust flow