Links From Websites With Good Citation Flow (Cf) And Trust Flow (Tf) Metrics
As its name suggests, citation flow is a metric introduced by Majestic SEO that is used to evaluate the quality of links pointing to a specific page or link within a site.
CF does not focus on the quantity of links that are directed to the website; rather, it focuses on the quantity of domains linking to the specific pages linked on a website. The main concept is that this defines links that are directed towards your site, which indicates your content is high-quality.
In other words, a link pointing to your site has to be authority and good quality.
This is a really difficult one to achieve, as opposed to the Citation Flow. Even when you are developing a quality link strategy, there are always directories or other kinds of backlinks pointing at your site that are not so qualitative. Even if you are developing a qualitative linking strategy, there are always some sorts of backlinks that are not very qualitative or related to your website.
If you head over to the Majestic Explorer tool and look at the Trust Flow and Citation Flow for your blog, you will see some of the impact that backlinks have on Majestic metrics according to the links that you are building each day. These trusted websites are hand-curated by Majestics team, and it is really difficult to get an unnatural link to them (which is what makes them trusted).
Majestic does not publish the details on what websites are used as seeds for the Majestic Trust, but look at the Top 1,000 spots in Majestics million, and you can probably spot several websites that would make it onto their trusted list. Majestic counts how many links are directed to your pages, checks their CF score, then passes CF from a portion of those linked pages on to your site.
If you link another site from a page that gets one link to it — that site also gets a fair chunk of trust-flow passed on to it (but a smaller chunk).
The Trust Ratio is much lower than 1, and shows this website has gained their link profile through the use of spammy techniques.
With a trust ratio of 1.259, you know the trustworthy has links from credible sources, and is a good website to promote for your clients. In short, the TF/CF Ratio concept measures how many links come from credible websites as opposed to total number of links.
Majestics trust flow measures how well websites are linking to the website, measuring a pages trustworthiness. Trust Flow is a metric used to assess the level of trustworthiness a site has, based on the trustworthiness and authority of the links that lead to a site or page. Citation Flow is an Majestic metric used to assess your domain, subdomains, and site authority, based on the quality of sites linking to your domain.
We can say that the algorithm is tuned to measure your Citation Flow, checking for influence by checking for the number of links that lead to your site, whereas Trust Flow is the measure made to check for the quality of those links.
The basics of why the trust flow works is that, if Trust flow is high while Trust flow is low, it means the site being checked has lots of link equity (or juice) but almost no trust coming from these links. A good Trust Flow is harder to achieve compared to Citation Flow, so Citation Flow is always going to get higher than your Trust Flow, since there are lots of links, but they are not all relevant. In contrast, there seems to be a direct correlation between the trust Flow and organic traffic.
In plain English, high trust flow is a telltale sign that you have quality content for Google and the other search engines. If a site with trust flow has a higher number of backlinks, it is a sign that site is getting decent organic traffic. As I already mentioned earlier in this article, that you need to only focus on improving trust flow to ensure your blog gets the spot at the top of search results, this is how organic traffic of a blog increases dramatically.
This just means a lot of lower-quality links are being pointed to a blog, and we all know the blogs on which low-quality links are higher, are at higher risk for being penalized by the Google algorithms.
If a trusted, authority website has CF that is far higher than Trust Flow, then no doubt that site is hosting lots of low-quality links. If sites with a higher CF, but lower TF, are linking to your website, this is going to negatively affect your Trust flow. This measure looks at how trustworthy the site is, measuring quality. Whether or not Google ranks a site high is a far better indication of how valuable links from this site are than site authority, domain rating, or any other 3rd-party metrics.
The uniqueness of similar metrics is that backlink quality analysis is used to compute the value, not ranking predictions as in Mozs Domain Authority. That is, with a similar metric, the quality of link masses within the project is estimated, but the data about rankings on organic search results are not. Domain rankings are dependent on the quality of link profiles, and this affects search results as well.
Google does not just look at quantity of links, Google looks at quantity through a prism of quality, credibility, relevancy, etc.
There is so much going on with Googles algorithm (supposedly more than 200+ items) that SEO that is out there is just measuring links, and that is only part of the equation. In fact, if a site has very high Trust Flow, that indicates that it has many quality backlinks, and therefore gets higher rankings on Google, as Google rewards quality backlinks. Relationships Between Major Metrics It is important to know what the recommended ratios are between Cf vs Tf.
