Web Profiler

Trust Flow and Citation Flow are the two main metrics applied by the famous SEO Majestic tool for analyzing backlinks. They evaluate a site and express its importance in numerical terms.

Until a few years ago, PageRank was the main yardstick for measuring the success of websites. The PR represented precisely the website´s authority perceived by Google. These indicators are updated virtually every day and are solid industry benchmarks.

The analysis of the Trust Flow and the Citation Flow, in fact, allows us to have a fairly clear idea of both the quantity of incoming links and their relative importance, in order to understand the authority of a website.

Trust flow

Trust Flow is an indicator that measures the authority of a site in terms of the quality of the backlinks it receives. In practice, it expresses how worthy of esteem a site is in relation to the authority of the backlinks it obtains. This indicator can have a value between 0 and 100.

Trust Flow is therefore a valuable quality as it indicates a high authority from Google’s point of view.

Simplifying, we can say that the Citation Flow indicates how many links point to a website, while the Trust Flow indicates the authority transmitted by the links pointing to the domain.

Citation flow

Citation Flow is an indicator that simulates how important a link placed on a website can be, considering how many links it receives in return.

For example, if I put a link to a site that has countless backlinks, that link will have a high Citation Flow value.

Citation Flow is an exclusively quantitative indicator and does not take into account the quality of the links in question. The more links directed to the site in question, the higher the value of the Citation Flow will be, regardless of whether they are links of good or bad quality. It can have a value between 0 and 100 and allows you to get an idea of the overall value of a link or website.

Regarding the ratio of the two indicators, we can say that when the Citation Flow is much higher than the Trust Flow we should be concerned, while when the Trust Flow is higher or at the level of the Citation Flow we know everything is okay.

The Trust Flow/Citation Flow ratio is called Trust Ratio and provides an estimate of trust towards a website. The higher the value, the greater the authority.

For example, if the Trust Flow is 10 and the Citation Flow is 50, the Trust Ratio is 0.20.

In general, we can say that:

• a ratio of less than 0.3 is considered very low.
• a ratio of 0.3 or 0.6 is considered acceptable.
• a ratio of 0.6 to 0.12 is considered very high (although usually the highest possible value is 0.9). Google is a special case as it has a ratio of 98/99.

When the Trust Flow and the Citation Flow are very different from each other, it can be a situation in which the quality of the links is much lower than their quantity, as in the case of:

• many links from sites deemed unfavorable.
• many links from sites not themed with that of the site.

A competently performed link building activity should have the aim of increasing Trust Flow, rather than Citation Flow. As you can imagine, Google prefers to praise sites with a portfolio of quality backlinks rather than many links with little value.

A link building agency should therefore set itself the goal of periodically acquiring links from relevant sites perceived as authoritative, always giving priority to the authority of the portals rather than their number.

A good strategy to increase Trust Flow consists, for example, in practicing guest posting activities on different sites. Proposing quality content for blogs in the sector in exchange for links allows you to consolidate your presence on authoritative sites related to your field and to receive themed links to increase your Trust Flow value.

It is therefore important to increase the value of thematic relevance to obtain backlinks from themed sites so as not to frustrate your efforts and make Google doubt the naturalness with which they were acquired.

Links should point to the home page and relevant internal pages in order to improve flow metrics. The links in question should be devoid of the nofollow attribute (which „dampens“ the value attributed to the links) because in this case only the Citation Flow (and not the Trust Flow) would increase.

The Domain Authority (DA) is a numerical metric, where the higher its value the greater the chances of ranking higher in the search engine results (SERP) and therefore obtaining more organic traffic (at least this is the goal of whoever created it).

The metric was developed by Moz, but other companies have created similar metrics that rank domains based on a variety of factors and assign them a rating from 0 to 100.

The idea of classifying domains according to their authority is based on the emulation of a system similar to PageRank, an algorithm introduced by Larry Page (one of the founders of Google) and is still used today to evaluate the importance and the positioning of pages and sites.

Domain authority is therefore comparable to PageRank, but with the difference that the latter can actually influence positioning on Google.

This is because domain authority depends on the data that Moz has on your site, which is not as accurate as what Google has, which of course collects and analyzes much more information.

For example, it is common for a domain with a low domain authority score to rank well in search engines.

Other things you should know about DA:

1) The DA does not take into account any penalties. A domain that is downgraded by Google loses rankings and traffic, but this is not necessarily evaluated by Moz. So the Domain Authority of a penalized site could still be high.

2) Google’s ranking algorithms take into account hundreds of factors (which nobody knows exactly), while the Domain Authority only takes into account 40 factors.

3) It’s not easy to change your DA score. It’s not something you can do by simply changing a few elements on your site today and immediately see an increase in Domain Authority tomorrow.

4) DA is based on a logarithmic scale. This means that it is easier to improve your Domain Authority score from 20 to 30 than it is to go from 70 to 80. As you move higher up the ladder, it becomes more difficult to increase your score.

5) The DA is not a metric that was created to evaluate the progress of an SEO campaign. It is rather a metric to be used for cross-domain comparison purposes and that is why the Domain Authority checker was created just as an additional SEO tool.

The Page Authority (PA) value is a score developed by Moz that provides hints on how a website will rank within the SERP. As with the Domain Authority, the Page Authority also varies from 1 to 100. The Page Authority is therefore defined in the same way as the Domain Authority, but only the data relating to a specific page are taken into consideration. However, it doesn’t take into account elements of the page such as keyword frequency or content quality.

Moz Page Authority explained

Moz uses a 100-point logarithmic scale to obtain the PA score. Just like Domain Authority, increasing the Page Authority score from 70 to 80 is significantly more difficult than from 20 to 30.

What is a good Page Authority

We want to underline that the Page Authority checker is, first of all, a comparative tool, therefore the notion of „good“ or „bad“ score is not easily defined. It is important to know your goals before using PA Checker.

Page Authority and Domain Authority

Every site that references its website conveys some portion of link authority. The more votes you get, the higher the search engines rank your site. So the thing is, both the website and a particular page have their own authority levels. They get it based on similar criteria and to maintain the integrity of the website you need to know both the domain and page authority rates. It may happen that both of these scores differ significantly.

How can I influence Page Authority?

Like Domain Authority, Page Authority is calculated based on a number of factors. Many processes directly affect it, so finding the exact reason for PA changes (via Page Authority check) is difficult, but experiments can still be performed to improve that score and Page Authority level. Google, in fact, takes into consideration various criteria to classify the pages and each of them influences the score in terms of Page Authority.

The Spam Score is a value that indicates the percentage of sites with similar characteristics that have been penalized by Google and which have therefore disappeared from search results.

The Spam Score is calculated by the machine learning algorithms of the Moz tool, which are based on 27 patterns common to the millions of penalized sites analyzed. It is a parameter motivated by varied bases ranging from the quality of the contents to the authority of the brand linked to the portal.

This indicator is the result of long and detailed analyzes relating to the factors that many penalized sites had in common and constitutes a good yardstick of their reliability.

The Spam Score is based on 27 signals analyzed by Moz including:

• Domain name length (a short domain name is more likely to be associated with spam sites)
• Presence of numbers in the domain name (frequent feature in spam sites)
• Absence of Google Tag Manager (shows little propensity to take care of site performance)
• Absence of the DoubleClick tag
• Absence of the Facebook pixel
• Absence of an associated LinkedIn account
• Absence of API fonts
• No browser icons
• Absence of a working phone number
• Absence of an email address
• Few pages on the site
• Non-local canonical
• Very short or very long Title fields
• Extremely high number of outbound links (and disproportionate to content)
• Very high number of outgoing links to unique domains
• Very long or very short URLs
• Presence of consecutive vowels or consonants
• Presence of suspicious words among the anchor text such as gaming, adult, etc.

In addition, the weighting of these factors over time can change based on Google’s choices, so Moz itself plans to make changes to the elements evaluated on a regular basis over time in order to make this indicator more reliable.

The Spam Score is viewable through the Moz Pro Link Explorer tool as a percentage number. From the Link Research item on the left, we can access the Spam Score item.

The tool, after analyzing a site, informs you of the percentage of links that fall into each of the cases of risk situations:

• From 1 to 30%: low
• From 31 to 60%: medium
• 61 to 100%: high (above 80% indicates an already very spammy site)

The incoming links for a site are then analyzed by the tool reporting, together with the other variables, also the Spam Score for each one.

What is the Spam Score for?

A large amount of very low value links is a red flag that prompts us to question the quality of our link building. The Spam Score is a value to be taken into consideration to assess whether a site is at risk of being penalized.

Why should we analyze this value for a given site?

For example, to hypothesize whether a site from which we want to receive a backlink runs the risk of being penalized. These considerations are important for the purposes of link building services, in order not to frustrate our efforts or, even worse, not to suffer damage to the positioning.

A high value of this score does not necessarily indicate that the portal in question is or will be penalized by Google. Rather, it’s like an alarm about something that is potentially wrong and that deserves a more in-depth analysis to ascertain its real extent.

Referring domain index – RDI shows us the number of referring domains in the relation to the chosen website. Based on the Majestic backlink index, this is the number of referring IP addresses. This site metric is more accurate than the number of backlinks, but keep in mind that multiple domains (websites) can share the same IP address.

A referring domain, also known as a linking domain, is a website that links to another website whose backlink profile you are analyzing. Every referring domain may contain one or more links to a website.

So, if every domain in your backlink profile links to you only once, the total number of referring domains and backlinks acquired will be equal. However, those instances are extremely rare because, in most cases, when you form a long-term partnership with a company, you will receive backlinks from their website on multiple occasions.

The Link Strength is a metric to calculate the overall strength of backlinks so you can focus on the most powerful backlinks.

How do we calculate the Link Strength

This is the one of site metrics will make your backlink analysis faster and more efficient. The calculation is based on the following metrics that determine the power of a backlink:

• Citation Flow
• Trust Flow
• Dofollow vs. Nofollow
• The page’s number of external links
• Social signals based on the number of Facebook shares.

The Citation Flow and Trust Flow are important indicators for calculating Link Strength.

What is an appropriate Link Strength value?

Link Strength is measured on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher the score, the stronger the backlink.

As an SEO specialist conducting a link building campaign, your goal is to obtain a few high-quality backlinks rather than a large number of low-quality or spammy links.