Citation Flow and Trust Flow: Everything You Should Know
Majestic has the largest link index on the planet. And it updates its index several times a day to ensure the latest metrics. It provides business owners, internet marketers, SEO experts the freshest metrics daily. It will help you show where your site is ranking by the back-link data it provides. It also shows how powerful each link is, as well as the detailed information on each anchor text profile. The tool is very visual and helps users see the overall quality of a website.
Several important metrics (such as Trust Flow & Citation Flow) that Majestic provides are explained below.
What is Trust flow?
Also commonly known as the abbreviation TF.
Is a metric/number that simply tells you how trustworthy a page is, based on the overall quality of the back-links that are pointing to the website.
Sites that have a high trust flow are usually rewarded with a Google ranking boost.
What is Citation Flow?
Also commonly known by the abbreviation CF.
Is a metric/number predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. The more sites linking to it the higher the Citation Flow metric.
Trust flow and Citation Flow ratio
The TF to CF metrics is very important in determining the overall trust of a site. And helps with weeding out spammy domains.
In order to get the Trust Flow ratio, do this computation: Trust Flow / Citation Flow = Trust Ratio average trust to citation flow ratio should be 0.80. More the authority and trustworthy the site, the ratio is higher. Spammy websites often have a high CF due to large number of back links but have a low TF, due to the fact that the back links are all from low authority websites. Hence they have a TF/CF ratio of < 0.8
How to measure flow metrics?
Measure your URL by heading over to Majestic, enter your URL, use fresh index, next hit the search button. It will now show you the backlinks of that URL along with metrics such as the Trust & Citation Flow, anchor text and other useful metrics.
Understanding Moz’s Metrics
One of the best ways to check your metrics on your sites is by installing the Moz Toolbar plugin. It is available as a free plugin for both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
After installing the Moz Toolbar, you will be able to check how many links that are incoming for your domain. You can also check specific metrics on different pages on your site, as well as see the popularity by viewing the social metrics that are provided by the tool.
Moz assigns a Page Authority metric as well as Domain Authority metric. Moz’s assigns a scoring system based on a 0 to 100 scale. For example Google.com ranks as high as 99 in both DA and PA metrics. New sites however, with no backlinks whatsoever will most likely have a low score below 10.
What is Domain Authority?
DA is a score from 0 to 100 that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines.
What is Page Authority?
Page Authority is a score from 0 to 100 that predicts how well a page will rank on search engines.
What is SEMrush?
SEMrush is another advanced tool used by SEO experts for SEO keyword research. It is an online tool that allows you to try for FREE for 30 days.
Once signed in, you will receive detailed data on your URL, along with data from your competition.
You can compile tons of data and conduct site audits along with analyzing potential keywords.
Of course, SEMrush offers many more features along with…
- Analyze data on your own url as well as your competitors traffic, volume and cpc data for certain keywords.
- Do an estimate of the monetary value of your keywords and traffic volume.
One can also use this tool for finding out the following metrics:
- Semrush Rank (A rank indicates the ranking of a domain compared to its peers.)
- Keywords (The number of keywords coming from the top 20 search engine results page(SERP) of Google.)
- Search Traffic (The number of visitors who come from the top 20 search results.)
- Cost (The cost which needs to be incurred for getting the same number of visitors from PPC.)
How Does Alexa Rankings Work?
It is web traffic tool for evaluating a website’s estimation of traffic and analytics. It aggregates data over a 3 month period based off traffic recorded from internet users that have the Alexa toolbar installed on their computers.
What Is Alexa Traffic Rank?
The Alexa Traffic Rank is basically the traffic rank of a site. And it is based off of 3 months of “historical” traffic data that is collected by users who install the Alexa Toolbar.
What Is Alexa Toolbar?
It is a installed tool that sends data and browsing information over to Alexa. It a useful tool for checking a website’s Alexa Rankings and gives you a quick visual on the overall traffic estimate of a given site.
You can download the Alexa Toolbar from here.
The quality of Alexa’s Rankings has decreased over time. The rank is easy to manipulate and since the source data is a small sample, many experts believe that the ranks do not mean anything. There is another tool online that possibly provides much more accurate data. Which brings us to…
SimilarWeb offers a very similar service to Alexa.
It is very similar to Alexa in the sense that both give you traffic estimates on a given domain.
SimilarWeb receives its data from a variety of sources, and also important to mention, SimilarWeb has over hundred million devices and other internet sources that are linked to its service. Certainly of the two, SimilarWeb is the preferred tool of choice for many SEO experts.