Trust Flow: what this metric indicates about your SEO

Since the public version stopped updating in 2013, Google’s classic PageRank algorithm has lost weight in favor of other methods to catalog the relevance of web domains. We are going to analyze two of the most popular metrics today, Trust Flow and Citation Flow , and explain how they are calculated and how useful it is to know them.   

  

What is Trust Flow

Trust Flow is an SEO metric used by the companies Majestic and Moz; Its tools to measure web domain authority are the most used at the moment, and serve as a reference to thousands of sites to know their level of relevance.    

In Spanish, Trust Flow means trust flow. This metric measures the quality of incoming links to a web domain, by counting the number of clicks that a user has to click to get from one trusted site to another.  

In a flow marketing context , having a good Trust Flow index means that the domain profile has good quality inbound links (there is a two-way interaction between domains), which improves its positioning in Google and other search engines. In this way, it guarantees greater visibility of the website .  

Trust Flow and Citation Flow

A common mistake in SEO strategies is getting a very high number of inbound links regardless of the reputation of the site they come from. We say that it is a mistake because, when push comes to shove, search engines also take into account the quality of the links . 

Therefore, Citation Flow is the other great SEO metric proposed by the aforementioned developers; provides more generic information, since it only measures the number of backlinks   

The quotient between both metrics is the Flow Ratio , which tells us how many quality links there are for each incoming link that a page receives. 

As can be deduced, Citation Flow, by itself, does not provide information about the reputation of a domain, while Trust Flow (and the relationship between the two) does give us a more accurate reference about the authority of a website.

How Trust Flow is calculated

To obtain the Trust Flow of the web domain you own, you will have to use the Majestic and Moz tools: Citation Trust and Domain Authority , respectively. The first also has a toolbar that is integrated into the Google Chrome browser. 

By allowing these tools to analyze your website, you will see that the Trust Flow index increases in value if the incoming links come from sites with a good reputation , and decreases if not. 

Trust Flow and Citation Flow measure two different realities about backlinks: the first evaluates the quality of incoming links, and the second measures only the quantity of them. The key to knowing the reputation of your domain will be to compare them and study their quotient. The more quality backlinks you have for each incoming link, the higher the authority of your website and, consequently, the better positioned it will be in the Google engine.