There are numerous factors that determine the extent to which a website is easily discoverable or not. One of these factors is link building, or the collection of backlinks on external websites, thereby creating higher domain authority.
Link Building
Link building is a key pillar of your SEO strategy alongside SEO content and SEO techniques. However, make sure you don’t just collect backlinks to your website or “exchange links” with irrelevant websites. The latter can end up costing you dearly, because if you do link building incorrectly, it can even have a counterproductive effect on your Google ranking.
Fortunately, there are a number of useful SEO tools that make it easier for you to set up and execute a good link-building strategy. One of those tools is Majestic SEO, and they use a metric called Trust Flow. What is Trust Flow, and how can you use this metric for your SEO?
About Trust Flow
In fact, you can view Trust Flow as a method for conducting analyses. These analyses are specifically focused on determining the reliability of a particular website. Or rather, of the backlinks pointing to your own website. Trust Flow assigns these backlinks a reliability score between 0 and 100.
The higher the score, the more reliable the backlink. Strictly speaking, Trust Flow therefore assesses the reliability of a backlink, but this score naturally also says a lot about the site where the backlink is placed.
Why is Trust Flow important?
It can be essential to be aware of the quality and reliability of external sites from which you link to your own website. The better and more reliable such an external site is, the better backlinks from it are evaluated by Google. This, in turn, has a positive impact on the ranking of your organic search positions. After all, link building isn’t about the number of backlinks to your website. These days, the quality of the links is a much more important factor.
How do you improve Trust Flow?
First, run a scan in Majestic: ideally, you’ll score a good Trust Flow, which means you’re on the right track. Consider solutions if you notice that the Trust Flow of your backlinks isn’t optimal.
Tip: Also check your competitors’ Trust Flow so you know how your website compares to other players in the market.
Here are some ways you can improve your Trust Flow:
- From now on, focus first and foremost purely on the quality of your backlinks, rather than the quantity.
- Focus more than ever on high-quality backlinks from external sites that are highly regarded by Google.
- Identify which backlinks have a (too) low Trust Flow and ensure these links are removed.
Difference from Citation Flow
The terms Trust Flow and Citation Flow are sometimes used interchangeably. Since both terms are used in Majestic, this may be understandable, but in fact, these are truly two different terms.
The Citation Flow indicates how many backlinks your website has accumulated so far. Unfortunately, this number does not say anything about the quality and reliability of the backlinks, but it does provide a good indication of how your website ranks in search engines.
We recommend regularly checking both Trust Flow and Citation Flow, along with domain authority, of course. It’s important to find a good balance between these two metrics: after all, you want high-quality and relevant backlinks to your website, but preferably more rather than fewer.
