What does citation flow mean

A screenshot of the Majestic site showing the trust flow and citation flow of google. URLs and websites closely linked to one of these seed websites will have a higher trust flow score than those who have far fewer. The reasoning here is akin to a professional reference for a job: the more positive references a person has from experts in their field, the more like you are to hire them, right?

So, the more trusted backlinks a website has, the higher the trust flow score. Ultimately, it is the ratio of these two metrics that is of importance: the closer the ratio between trust flow and citation flow the better because this indicates that the majority quantity of the backlinks are of quality. Topic scores are independent of each other. Trust Flow Defined So what is trust flow? Keywords Are Still King Some marketers declared keywords dead as things began to shift toward quality content and backlinking, but alas, they were wrong.

Quality More Important Than Quantity For Backlinks Too Producing consistent content helps to keep you ranking high in Google search, but having strong, relevant content is actually more important. How To Boost Your Trust Flow Ranking Now that you know how useful a tool trust flow can be to your marketing efforts, you might wonder what you can do to make your page rank higher in search. Empowering you to break the mold. Learn More. Take the first step towards growth today.

Get a proposal View all case studies. What do you need help with? Content Marketing. Influencer Outreach. Social Media. Email Marketing. Tell us about your business. Your company name. What state are you located in? How did you hear about us? Where can we send your proposal? Your name. Your last name. Let's take this to the SEO level: your site may show a high citation flow, indicating that your site is being linked to by a large number of other domains. This may seem great at first, however, the majority of the sites turn out to be robot sites, spammers, random and little-known blogs, and more.

Ultimately, this does little to show that your site is an authority and deserves to be ranked, and is indicative of a high citation flow and low trust flow. A high citation flow and high trust flow means that your site is frequently being linked to by other high-authority sites such as Forbes, Washington Post, Reuters, etc. This combination of flow metrics highlights that your site or a page on your site is trustworthy and the people citing it are experts.

Check out our ultimate link building guide to learn how to earn powerful backlinks to empower your web content in search. Since flow metrics are trademarked by Majestic, you can go to their website for citation flow, trust flow, and other link intelligence data.

There, you can get backlink information for your website and competitor sites alike. Signing up for this tool can enlighten you on topical trust flow, a list of all referring domains linking to your site, the context of these backlinks, anchor text used in links, and much more. Since citation flow is only half of the flow metrics conversation, there really is no "good" citation flow number to shoot for.

Naturally, you want sites to link to yours, but a good citation flow will only be understood in its relation to trust flow. Ideally, you want every link you acquire to be a trustworthy link.

This would represent a citation-to-trust ratio of , and would be exemplary. Anything below this means that the majority of your links are low quality.

For instance, if your citation flow is 30 and trust flow is 15, then you have a ratio of — an average site. All in all, having a good trust flow score means that you are linking only to quality websites and receive a steady stream of traffic.

Like a good thesis or research paper in the academic world, having the best sources would prove to be the key ingredients to success. Over the years, we have seen numerous websites that have become very influential with how we navigate or use the internet, such as Google and Facebook. These websites not only affect our internet experience but also possesses a certain impact to users overall. This means well-known websites are more likely to bring in more impact, which is what Citation Flow is.

Citation Flow measures the popularity of the links within your website, making a more influential website. Unlike Trust Flow, Citation Flow does not take into account the quality of the backlinks but instead take a look at how popular the website is.

This means that while they may gain high traffic, they may not contain trustworthy content. This can include pornographic or spammy content, both of which can negatively affect your traffic. This allows you to see how Trust and Citation Flow are decided using factors such as organic traffic, the number of quality backlinks and referring domains. When it comes to content marketing and link building, this data is very important, as you would be able to determine the best places to connect with, along with finding the best sources for your content.