Trust flow

Trust flow is a metric used in SEO to determine the quality of the links pointing to a web address or domain. It measures the authority and relevance of the URL or domain those external links (backlinks) point to.

Used by the companies Majestic and Moz, trust flow started to gain relevance in 2013, when Google stopped making its PageRank metric public.

Nowadays, search engines value the quality of the links a site receives more than the sheer number of links, which makes trust flow very relevant for SEO work. It is expressed as a value from 0 to 100, with 100 being the best possible score, for example: 85/100.

1. Trust flow and citation flow

The relationship and differences between trust flow and citation flow are often unclear, so it is worth keeping in mind that they are complementary metrics, but they do not measure the same thing.

Citation flow is a metric that measures the popularity of a website based on the number of links pointing to it (backlinks), regardless of their quality — what matters is the quantity.

Trust flow, on the other hand, measures the quality of the links a site receives, taking into account the path — the number of clicks — a user has to follow from the trusted site to reach yours.

In general, citation flow has a lower value than trust flow, since a site can have a large number of links, but not all of them will be high-authority links. There is a very simple relationship between the two metrics: if trust flow increases, citation flow increases as well, but this rule does not work the other way around — an increase in citation flow does not imply an increase in trust flow.

2. How to calculate trust flow?

To find out your domain's trust flow, you need to use the Moz and Majestic tools, specifically the Domain authority and Citation trust options. Majestic offers a toolbar compatible with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to make this task easier.