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Search Engine Optimization

What Majestic Citation Flow Means

Majestic Citation Flow is a trademark of Majestic. Majestic Citation Flow is a score between 0-100 which helps to measure the link equity or “power” the website or link carries. Majestic Citation flow is used in conjunction with “Trust Flow”. Together the Citation Flow and Trust Flow form the Majestic Flow Metric algorithm.

Majestic Citation Flow represents an evolutionary leap from our old metric – ACRank – and predicts how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. Links are now not all created with equal weight – and because a strong link will have a relatively stronger influence on URLs, Majestic itation Flow is based on stronger, iterative matematical logic than the old metric of ACRank.

Ways to Boost Your Majestic Citation Flow (and SEO)

  1. Connect with influencers. Connecting with influencers is important when building authoritative backlinks.
  2. Guest post on high-quality sites.
  3. Link internally.
  4. Continually audit backlinks.

Before talking about how to find the trust ratio of a site, you must first understand exactly how Citation Flow and Trust Flow work. Dixon’s article on Flow Metrics explains this terminology. But the main thing to remember is that Citation Flow is link juice and the Trust Flow is how close those links are to trustworthy, authoritative sources.

To get the Trust Flow you simply do the following calculation: Trust Flow / Citation Flow = Trust Ratio

The basics behind why the trust ratio works is because, if the Majestic Citation Flow is high and the Trust Flow is low, this means that the website being checked has a lot of link equity (or “juice”), but barely any trust from those links. This usually indicates that the site has gained those links from “spammy” areas of the web as they are not close to authoritative sources.

On the flip side of this, if a site has a high amount of Trust Flow and low Majestic Citation Flow this means that the links pointing to that site are from very trustworthy sources .i.e. a trustworthy site that you want a link from.

So in a nutshell this shows that using a quick glance of the Majestic SEO metrics of a site can really help you to decide whether a site is technically trustworthy or not. If you are within a digital marketing agency with a high volume of links to provide. This can save you hours of quality checking sites prior to contacting them to make sure the links you build are of the highest possible

If you want to speed the process up even more, use the Majestic SEO Chrome plugin to check the metrics as you look at the site.

This check is only a quick overview and does not always apply to every site. There are many perfectly trustworthy sites out there that have a Trust Flow lower than the Citation Flow. All you need is a bit of common sense when doing this. However sites with Citation Flow of 35 along with a Trust Flow of 7 are nearly always going to be poor quality sites. There are additional things you can do to make this more accurate such as using anchor text ratios and looking at the trust ratios of entire niches. But I will be covering this in another article so stay tuned. If you would more information or advice on any of the aspects covered within this article please get in touch. Increase Seo metrics guaranteed with our professional SEO services .

Categories
Search Engine Optimization

How Trust Flow Works

According to Majestic, “Trust Flow is one of the Majestic Flow Metrics, which is weighted by the number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites to a given URL, or Domain.” In Laymen’s terms, Majestic determines the score based on the traffic that flows through a link, the relevancy of the linking site, and the links linking to the linking site.

What is Topical Trust Flow?

Based on our testing, Topical rating is based on the relevancy of links going to any given website. This variation of the metric is incredibly accurate and we use it for every link building campaign.

Competitor Analysis

We use Majestic Trust Flow to sift through competitors link profiles to see which ones are worth acquiring. As a rule of thumb, we only pay attention to links that are Topically relevant. So, let’s say I wanted to rank for keyword “weight loss programs.”

Before jumping in and analyzing competitors links, we want to make sure that we’re only analyzing competitors that have topically relevant links. A site that’s ranking without topically relevant links is futile and more than likely fueled by spam. Don’t waste your time looking at these sites.

Link Prospecting

Majestic Trust Flow is an amazing metric for qualifying potential link opportunities. It can also be used for finding relevant guest posts, directories, resource lists, forums, expired domains, or pretty much anything. So, if you’re searching for guest post opportunities, simply toss the sites into the “Bulk Backlinks” option and follow the same steps I listed above to sift through them. You’ll now have an amazing list of relevant link opportunities that are going to drive your rankings up.

You can also gather a list of directories to see if they are worth submitting your site to.

Keep in mind, Majestic and the Trust Flow metric are not always 100% reliable. People using private blog networks have the ability to block Majestic from crawling their websites. That means when you perform a competition analysis, you will not see the links. Unfortunately there is really no solution to this issue unless Majestic figures out a way to get through the bot blockers. Only a small percentage of people doing SEO use private blog networks to rank, so you may or may not run into this.

Obviously Google isn’t using Majestic’s metric, but they are using relevancy as a way to eliminate networks. Private Whois, different personalities, internal links, and whatever other garbage people say “protects” networks is just fluff. The only consistent strategy that protects a network site from being deindexed is to have content and outbound links that are relevant to the domain’s Topical Trust Flow.

If your website is about “health” and all of your PBN sites have “Health” as your Topical TF, it’s nearly impossible for Google to find your network unless you get a manual review.

Moral of the story: if you’re going to use a private blog network, make sure the content, outbound links and Topical Trust Flow are relevant to your money site. Not only does it keep your site safer, but your network will be way more effective.