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01Aug

Flow Metrics: Citation Flow and Trust Flow

Who doesn’t want its page to rank top in the Google? Of course everyone, and for this, we need to understand what factors add to a page’s Google ranking. Why link building plays a vital role in the SEO? What metrics are important when it comes to link building?   Google gives much of importance to the metrics like authority domain, citation flow metrics, and trust flow in SEO. But what are they and how do they matter? Here in this article, you will learn about trust and citation flow and their importance in search engines.

Citation flow or trust flow are the metrics which tells about the quality or trust about a particular web page. You can use Majestic or Moz tools to know these metrics of your websites or web pages. For most of the people, these two metrics are like black holes. But, come let’s together know them what they are and why are they important in Quality link building services.

First of all, both the metrics are the components of Flow metrics. Now, here comes the question what is flow metrics? Flow metrics are expressed as the numbers from 0 to 100; the more the number, the better is the flow. These are updated daily and hard to be manipulated, thus becomes a promising factor to rank web pages.  Let’s come back to the point.

Trust Flow : Trust flow determines the quality of the website. It shows the trustworthiness of a site or link by measuring its quality. Quality here generally refers to the quality of the backlinks pointing to the site. Trust flow doesn’t increase with the number of backlinks. You may have several backlinks to your site, but if they are bad backlinks, they are useless for a good trust flow. To increase the trust flow in SEO, you should have authoritative, high-quality backlinks to your website. In simple words, trust flow is a number which calculates the reliability of your domain based on the backlink proximity.

Citation Flow : Citation flow is yet another metrics by Majestic. It refers to the popularity of a link on the site. It has nothing to do with the quality of the link. It forecasts how promising a link to a site is by considering the link pointing to it.  You may take the example of the porn sites. These are not qualitative links however they are very much well-liked and have thousands of links pointing to them, thus have a higher citation flow number.

Here are some figures calculated for BBC.com

How they interact?

It is very crucial to know the ratio between the TF and CF to maintain the overall quality of the site. From the above statements, it is clearly understood that if the TF increases, CF is also increased, but the other way is not mandatory. So, if a site with high CF and low TF links to your page, then it shows negative TF.

Since flow metrics are measured in number (0-100). If the TF is 20 and CF is 40, then the ratio is 1:2 which shows a low-quality site. The best ratio seems to be 1. An average trust to citation flow ratio is 0.50. The higher the ratio, the more authoritative is the site.

How to Increase the Citation Flow and Trust Flow Metrics

  1. Use no follow backlinks carefully.
  2. A good backlink strategy is helpful.
  3. Focus on quality and authoritative backlinks.
  4. Use .edu or .gov backlinks; they are trustworthy.
  5. Comment on other blogs.

Google has been stressing on the flow metrics with the goal to have quality backlinks. So just focus on authoritative backlinks to improve your overall metrics. They are a good signal for Google to rank the site.

If you want to learn more about web traffic, or seeking for a good SEO or Link building services, then contact us. We would be glad to serve you.

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