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 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.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 SEM topics.