Trust flow

Trust flow is a metric used in SEO to determine the quality of the links directing users to a web address or domain. It allows the system to measure the authority and relevance of the URL or domain to which these external links (backlinks) are directed.

Used by the companies Majestic and Moz, trust flow became more relevant after 2013, when Google stopped publishing its PageRank metric.

Nowadays, search engines value the quality of the links received more than the quantity of links, so trust flow is very relevant for SEO work. This data is expressed with a value from 0 to 100, being 100 the best result, for example: 85/100.

1. Trust flow and citation flow

Trust flow and citation flow; many times the differences between these two concepts are not clear , but we should explain that these are complementary metrics, even if they don’t measure the same thing.

Citation flow is a metric used to measure the popularity of a website taking into account the number of links directed to the site (backlinks), so here the quality of each link is not the most relevant factor, the number is more important.

On the other hand, trust flow measures the quality of the links that are received and takes into account the path, number of clicks, that the user has to make from the trusted site to reach ours.

In general, citation flow has a lower value than trust flow, since you can have a large number of links but not all of them will be of high authority. There is a very simple relationship between both metrics: if the trust flow increases, the citation flow also increases, but this rule doesn’t work the other way around, and if the citation flow increases it doesn’t imply that the trust flow increases.

2. How to calculate the trust flow?

To find the trust flow of your domain, you should use the Moz and Majestic tools, specifically in the Domain authority and Citation trust options. In the case of Majestic, they offer a toolbar compatible with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers to facilitate this task.