Trust Flow

The Trust Flow together with Citation Flow forms a value that is supposed to illustrate the trustworthiness of a website. The company Majestic SEO provides these two values together as Majestic Flow Metrics as a tool for search engine optimization.

Definition

The company Majestic SEO offers the metric Trust Flow since 2012. In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), the company is known as the provider of a large link database. It is this database that the company uses to determine the trust flow of a website. Together, these result in the Majestic Flow Metrics.

This value is based on a very similar concept to Domain Authority. Similar to how Google’s algorithm calculates Domain Authority, Trust Flow expresses a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that shows the quality of your backlinks. The provider presents Trust Flow and Citation Flow in values between 0 and 100 and illustrates them graphically in a diagram.

The number and especially the quality of your backlinks – a link from a third party website to your site – is an important part of Google’s algorithm that assigns your site a position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

How is the trust flow created?

Majestic SEO determines trust flow using a list of websites hand-curated by the company and updated daily. Majestic SEO assigns a value to the seed websites entered in this list, which reflects the quality of a backlink. This index also creates a list of untrustworthy websites, the Bad Neighbourhood. For your link building, it is therefore important not to have backlinks from sites in this bad neighborhood, as those will hurt your site more than good links will help you.

Because a good trust flow is calculated from links from a particularly trustworthy environment, it is significantly more meaningful for the quality of backlinks than the citation flow.

How can you read trust flow and citation flow?

In the interaction of Trust Flow and Citation Flow you can see on the one hand how present your page is on the internet and how trustworthy it is classified. On the other hand, you can see how good your backlinks are.

Majestic SEO expresses these Key Performance Indicators between 0 and 100 and transfers them in a diagram. In this graph, the value of each link is assigned the Citation Flow on the X-axis and the Trust Flow on the Y-axis. From this image you can conclude important information about the presence and quality of your site.

Since each point in this graph corresponds to a backlink, it takes a large number of backlinks to get a meaningful picture. Because many links are necessary for a meaningful graphic, this tool is more suitable for large websites than small ones.

Conclusion

With the flow metrics you get a KPI that gives you an important statement about the quality of your backlinks. However, you can only get a full picture by using both key figures. The graphic you can create with the two values is naturally more useful for large websites than for small ones.

Your Trust Flow score is based on the scores of the Majestic SEO group. Therefore, they may differ from Google’s values. You can find that out with tools like Google Analytics.