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

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 […]

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Majestic Seo Logo 1Majestic 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:

Majestic Seo Flow

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:

LinkProfile Searchengineland Com

Search Engine Roundtable:

LinkProfile Seroundtable Com

Google:

LinkProfile Google Com

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.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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