Trust flow

Trust flow, or confidence flow, is a metric used in SEO to determine the quality of the links pointing to a web address or domain. It lets you measure the authority and relevance of the URL or domain that these external links (backlinks) point to.

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

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. It is expressed as a value from 0 to 100, where 100 is the best result, for example: 85/100.

1. Trust flow and citation flow

The relationship and differences between trust flow and citation flow are often unclear. It helps to understand that they are complementary metrics, but they don’t 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). What matters here is not the quality of the links but their quantity.

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. The relationship between the two metrics is very simple: if trust flow increases, citation flow also increases, but the rule doesn’t work the other way around. A higher citation flow doesn’t mean a higher trust flow.

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. Majestic offers a toolbar compatible with the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers to make this task easier.

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