Majestic Metrics
Majestic arguably has the largest data set of publically accessible link information in the world. They are one of the leaders in the SEO analysis industry and are most well known for their two metrics - Trust Flow and Citation Flow. To be able to properly understand and use the full power of Majestic's data, a fundamental understanding of both these metrics is essential.
A big mistake many people make when starting their SEO career is trying to inflate these metrics, they think a good TF or CF will help you rank in Google. This is not how it works. These are just Majestic's interpretations of how Google rates link strength. They are only useful to compare sites to one another, they should not be used as a 'target' when trying to rank. That being said, Majestic's TF and CF are some of the best metrics we have at our disposal as SEOs - and our job would be a whole lot harder without them.
You can jump in right now and use our tool to check the Majestic metrics of your chosen list of urls. The tool checks the following metrics: Citation Flow (CF), Trust Flow (TF), Backlinks (BL), and Referring Domains (RD). Further down the page you will find an overview which will enable you to judge backlink profiles with ease.
Check Majestic Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Backlinks and Referring Domains for up to 30 urls now
Metric Results
Url:The url in question
TF:Majestic's Trust Flow metric
CF:Majestic's Citation Flow metric
BL:The number of backlinks the url has in Majestic's database
RD:The number of referring domains the url has in Majestic's database
Download Data
You can choose to download the data in the table above as either a CSV file or an XLSX file by clicking on the icons below.
What Is Citation Flow?
Citation Flow (commonly abbreviated to CF) is regularly described to be a wide range of different things, it is the more misunderstood of the two metrics. What citation flow actually represents is the raw number of links pointing to a site. It is essentially Majestic's interpretation of Google's now defunct Page Rank score.
How Is Citation Flow Calculated?
Citation flow is calculated very easily. Majestic counts the amount of links that are pointing to your page, checks their CF rating and then passes some of the linking pages CF on to your website. CF doesn't care about quality in any way, shape, or form - it's all about quantity.
How Do You Increase Citation Flow?
Citation flow is the easier of the two Majestic metrics to increase. You simply need to get as many links as you can, from as many places as you can. WARNING: Increasing your citation flow by using large amounts of low quality, spammy links will not help your position in the SERPS. It will only increase the metric in Majestic's dataset, and in all likelihood, it will get your site penalized.
What Is Trust Flow?
Trust Flow (commonly abbreviated to just TF) is the way Majestic determines the quality of a websites links. This is important because not all links are created equally, and a link from whitehouse.gov is going to be much more powerful than a link from the comments section of lowqualitywebsite.blogspot.com.
How Is Trust Flow Calculated?
Majestic determines Trust Flow based on how close a website is linked to a set of trusted seed websites. These trusted websites were manually curated by Majestics team, and they are very hard to get an unnatural link on (which is what makes them trusted). Majestic does not release information on which websites are used as their trusted seeds but take a look at the top 1000 spots of the Majestic Million, and you will probably be able to pick out a few websites that would be on their trusted list.
If you get a link directly from one of these trusted websites, your website will receive a large amount of Trust Flow. If you link to another website from the page that got the trusted link to it - that website will also get a reasonable amount of trust flow passed to it (but a lesser amount). This cascading and diluting effect keeps on going down through several links until it is too far away from the source to have any effect.
How Do You Increase Trust Flow?
Due to the very nature of the metric, increasing trust flow is much more difficult to do than increasing citation flow. You will need to try and persuade editors of trustworthy sites to link to you. This could be done with excellent guest posts, infographics, or you could go blackhat and straight up try and buy a link from them.
How Do I Use TF And CF?
Many people make the mistake of thinking of TF and CF as two separate metrics; in reality, they have been designed to be used together in harmony. There is a very easy equation that can be performed which gives an 'at a glance' overview of the quality of a sites overall backlink profile. All you need to do is take a websites TF score and divide it by its CF score, this will result in a number with decimal points. The higher the score, the better the overall link profile is. Anything over 0.9 is a strong profile, between 0.7 and 0.8 is a respectable link profile, anything lower than 0.6 is low quality.
This 'Trust ratio' is an incredibly robust method of backlink analysis, it is very hard to manipulate with spam and 9 times out of 10 it is the most reliable way to quickly gauge the quality of a link profile. It is no substitute for manual link analysis, but it enables SEOs to get a great quick overview. This is useful in a number of situations.
With the unstoppable rise of PBNs people are buying expired domains more than ever before. Thousands of multithreaded dedicated bots are searching for dropped domains and scraping all the popular auction sites to find hidden gems. Using the TF/CF ratio is a great way to find candidates that are worthy of manual analysis. Similarly, it can be used to determine the value of a link placement on a website, which is useful when finding people to reach out to for white hat link building (or for when you are looking to try and buy a blackhat link).
The ratio is also useful for assessing competition when doing keyword analysis. It is a quick and easy way to judge the strength of the sites currently in the top spots. Many keyword research tools have access to Majestic's API built into them, allowing automated tools to highlight keywords that are worthy of manual inspection.