Ever since Google PageRank stop updating back in October 2014, Majestic’s trust and citation flow and Moz’s domain and page authority metric had become a powerful tools to measure a website’s value or rank. These website link metric measurement tools comes into my attention because recently i’ve helped a friend purchase a website, he’s clueless about website value so i tried to make his investment as worthy as possible.
It is known that Google using metric like domain authority, page authority, trust flow and citation flow when positioning article’s ranking in search engine. This is why link metric analyst tools from Majestic and Moz had become an important factor in search engine ranking position, also known as SERP. However today, we will dig deeper into the meaning of trust flow and citation flow.
What is Citation Flow?
Citation flow measure the total external backlinks to your domain. The more external backlinks you have, the higher citation flow will be. Although it doesn’t mean if you have 100 millions external backlinks, you’ll have high citation flow. The flow will count referring domain to measure the exact citation flow level. The metric math will be like “total external links/total referring domains”. Take below table for example.
| Domain | Total Links/Refer Domain | Ratio | Citation Flow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google.com | 37,004,297,084/20,275,317 | 1825.09 | 99 |
| Majestic.com | 2,910,586 / 7,562 | 384.896323724 | 65 |
| Moz.com | 14,920,047 / 58,154 | 256.560976029 | 62 |
| Dezzain.com | 1,147,630/7,694 | 149.159085001 | 39 |
As you can see, even though Moz had more external backlinks than Majestic, its citation flow level is lower than Majestic. That’s why citation flow also count the unique referring domain when measuring the citation flow of a domain. Its safe to say that the higher measurement ratio you have, the higher citation flow will be. However citation flow in url and subdomain will also affect the flow measurement of root domain.
What is Trust Flow?
Trust flow measure the quality of your external backlinks. The more quality sites linked to your domain, the higher trust flow you will have. What consider a quality external backlinks? backlinks usually comes in various form, its either a social backlinks, web 2.0 profile backlinks, directory backlinks, guest post backlinks and comments backlinks. You can’t control what kind of backlinks you will have, if a blogger find your resource useful and linked to your post but his/her sites is full of spam then the backlink might be flag as low quality, and this will slightly affect your trust flow.
Therefore when building links, its better to have 1 high quality authority backlink than 100 low quality backlinks. It is rumored that the higher trust flow you got, the easier for your site to rank in search engines. In Layman’s terms, high trust flow is the clear sign of having high-quality content to Google and other search engines. If there are more backlinks to a site that carry the trust flow, then it is the sign that the site is getting decent organic traffic.
How to Measure Site’s trustworthy
A site’s trustworthy can be measure with trust flow and citation flow ratio. The best ratio for a very trustworthy site is above 1.0, and optimal trustworthy is above 0.5, below 0.4 are consider low trust with lots of spammy low quality links. How do you measure this?
Trust Flow / Citation Flow = Trustworthy Ratio
| Domain | Trust Flow | Citation Flow | Ratio | Trustworthy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google.com | 100 | 99 | 1.01 | Great |
| Moz.com | 65 | 62 | 1.04 | Great |
| Majestic.com | 37 | 65 | 0.57 | Good |
| Dezzain.com | 25 | 39 | 0.64 | Good 🙂 |
I would suggest installed chrome’s extension for Majestic Link Analyzer and Moz Tool Bar.
Conclusion
Finally you might be wondering what domain or site i’ve helped my friend acquired, well its a news site covering interesting news, facts, humor and flashy headline news. What i like about the domain? beside the name Newsflashing.com, its also an aged domain, about 9 years, no spammy link farming from previous owner, a dmoz directory linked and it had balance trust and citation flow that can be well developed in the future.
