Citation flow (CF) and Trust Flow (TF) are metrics from Majestic SEO. They are not a direct ranking factor but are indicators.
CF and TF are used to measure the quality of backlinks. A higher CF and TF means that more trusted and authoritative websites are linking to your website.
TF & CF
CF and TF are both flow metrics developed by Majestic SEO to help SEOs better understand how a site is performing within the context of natural referencing. While DA, PA and KD are all great ways to measure authority, CF and TF offer a more targeted approach to evaluating trust and quality.
Essentially, Citation Flow measures the ability of a website/blog to influence others in the niche, while TF looks at the trustworthiness of those who link to the blog. Both are based on a proprietary algorithm. The higher the score, the more powerful and trustworthy the domain.
Keep in mind that backlink profiles are fluid and can change on a daily basis. So it’s important to monitor them constantly, especially when releasing new content, in order to detect any toxic links and remove them from your profile.
Luckily, there are several tools that provide TF and CF analysis and monitoring as part of their suite of services. The most popular is probably Majestic SEO, but there are also a few others such as OnCrawl, which offers an in-depth CF and TF analysis and monitoring service alongside its comprehensive suite of other SEO data analysis features. Pricing starts at $39. There are also many free TF and CF checking tools available online, such as this one from Moz.
Citation Flow & Trust Flow
Citation Flow and Trust Flow are metrics created by Majestic SEO that analyze a website’s backlinks to measure the quality of its link building. While they are not directly a part of Google’s algorithm, they can help determine the overall health of a website and its relevance. These two metrics replace PageRank and are used to identify high-quality links. If you see someone claiming to be an expert and uses PR as their measuring tool, that’s a clear indicator they have no clue how SEO works in 2018.
Both TF and CF are important to understand because they give you a snapshot of the overall health of your link profile. While CF measures the number of quality links to your site, TF measures how trustworthy those links are. It’s a good idea to have both of these scores for your website and work on improving them.
While TF and CF are not direct ranking factors, they have significant influence on Google’s algorithms. Incorporating these metrics into your search engine optimization strategy helps ensure you’re creating quality backlinks and helping your client’s websites rank higher. This is especially true as the strength of PageRank diminishes. As a result, TF and CF become more important to understand. Having both in your back pocket can be the difference between a client ranking highly or not at all.
Citation Flow & TF
While TF and CF are related metrics, they were created to solve different problems. They are useful tools for monitoring SEO progress and identifying problematic links. To get the best results, webmasters should use them in combination with other metrics that reveal more information about the situation on the link mass.
For example, if a page has a high TF but low CF, it’s better to focus on improving the quality of its internal linking. This way, a site will have a better chance of ranking highly for relevant keywords. In turn, the site’s visitors will be more likely to engage with its content.
Moreover, creating high-quality, search-focused and link-worthy content will help to improve both CF and TF scores. The reason is that high-quality pages tend to earn more links, and these will pass a higher level of authority to the pages they link to.
