Majestic SEO Announces New Link Metrics: Trust Flow & Citation Flow

May 14, 2012 at 9:43am ET by Barry Schwartz

Majestic SEO announced a new set of link metrics they came up with that should give Google’s PageRank metric and SEOmoz’s MozRank a run for their money.

Majestic SEO’s new metrics are named Flow Metrics and are grouped into two categories; trust flow and citation flow.

Citation Flow is a number of predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it.
Trust Flow is a number predicting how trustworthy a page is based on how trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbors.

What Do Flow Metrics Look Like?

Let’s compare Search Engine Land to Search Engine Roundtable to Google:

Keep in mind, the values for citation and trust flow are between 0 and 100, where Google is a 99 on both, Search Engine Land has a citation flow of 75 and trust flow of 64 and Search Engine Roundtable has a citation flow of 69 and trust flow of 43.

Let’s visualize how this looks on a chart. Majestic SEO explains that links with high Citation flow end up more to the right and links with more Trust flow end up higher on the chart.

Search Engine Land:

Search Engine Roundtable:

Google:

I asked Branko Rihtman (aka @neyne) what he thinks of the new metrics and he was very pleased. He said it is a huge improvement over Majestic SEO’s AC rank metric and says these new metrics “correlates to PageRrank much better than anything” else. Overall Branko feels “it provides a much better measurement of perceived quality.”

For more details, see Majestic SEO’s blog.

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building | SEM Tools: Links

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://www.barbie-games.net/ Marcusu Radu

This are some great news. I expected them to present something new
considering the rate at which they developed lately. They really have
demonstrated that they are the best site explorer at this moment. I’m
looking forward to test this update.
http://twitter.com/nsauser nsauser

I’m excited because I’ll probably move away from the Moz tools given the fact that the OSE and Linkscape has been poorly managed over the last couple of months.
http://twitter.com/seodio Seodio, Inc.

wow this is so cool! Thanks for your article! Got to love the new metrics. I will me looking into this further for sure. We also provide SEO Services So this is great news. Thanks Barry!
http://davidawilson.co.uk/ David Wilson

This seems interesting and provides an added bit of data to digest. It’s always nice to know a little more about the links to your site and to your competitions sites, but I’m not sure if this will be enough to make me transition to majestic. . .
http://www.getacho.com Samee Ullah Feroz

But the main important thing is that, flow and density are both important for google. according to perfect SEO I think so if you build 2 links in 1 day or in 1 week or any ratio of back links, you need to keep uniform that frequency for you website. if you Do SEO for this Flow it is best for you. and it is best way to keep your link metrics update for google and for your website ranking.
Overtock promo Codes
Pay4ResultsSEO

Well, interesting development but poorly presented. The three charts above are really not user friendly for specialists let alone clients.
http://www.stanleyoppenheimer.com searchengineman

I think this is only the first phase of Majestics offering.

It would make sense that the TRUST-CITATION box, could be more detailed, so you can identify..winning sites and losing sites via Mouse over – It would be nice if we could get a CSV output of the chart from 100,100 to 1,1 in order

- or side by side! being able to see your competitors links against yours, and identify the gaps..for LINK discovery!

I like the idea behind this, I think it can be useful.

Searchengineman
http://www.stanleyoppenheimer.com searchengineman

This is Hilarious,

You can really see the foot print of who’s doing
a great job online! The difference is staggering.

If you look at coke.com
http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/summary/coke.com
Citation Flow: 33 Trust Flow: 33
2773 – referring domains – 11854 backlinks

vr

pepsi.com
http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/summary/pepsi.com
Citation Flow: 57 Trust Flow:61
10908 – referring domains – 251284 backlinks

Searchengineman
http://twitter.com/peterelmhirst Peter Elmhirst

haha you just got someone fired searchengineman
http://www.stanleyoppenheimer.com searchengineman

Not fired, its always an opportunity, for someone to pitch Coke an appropriate online strategy.. I bet the poor online coke guys are struggling with resources and HIPPO’s. So maybe if they can take this post and say what the %$!#%.. Maybe it will light a fire under the right tuchus, instead of spending 3 million dollars on the next Super Bowl AD, on Madison Avenue..

The rules are different with brands. Pepsi IMHO is always trying to get in the face of the younger crowd–and have succeeded. So it makes sense Pepsi is chasing more eyeballs online to nail that audience down.. While Coke is what your father & grandfather drinks. Coke is not going away, But they’re playing catch up.

It’s kind of scary that the link graph of who’s on top. Eerily matches the financials of these two soda giants.http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=coke+sales+vs+pepsi+sales

But what the hell do I know (   Correlation is not Causation)
just becauseit looks connected doesn’t mean it actually ishttp://www.businessweek.com/magazine/correlation-or-causation-12012011-gfx.html  (funnier)

(Disclaimer – I like Coke, I work online, I am a father!)

Searchengineman
http://twitter.com/NecatiTure Necati Türe

I think the previous way of shoving metrics was more user frendly. This new one is a bit complicated..
Tercume
Marielaina Perrone

This is awesome information. I am so new to all of this. Learning so much from sites like this
Marielaina Perrone DDS
http://www.drperrone.com
http://ducktoes.com Cathie

So what is the most ideal score to have with this?
http://www.seo-service-provider.org/ SEO Service Provider

Excellent explanation. I have checked my new site citation flow and trust flow. It’s respectively 10 & 6.. I am feeling like hang myself :(