Trust Flow vs Domain Authority: Is Trust Flow a Good Predictor of SEO Success?

Trust Flow is a metric created by Majestic SEO in 2017 that measures how many authority links a site has, i.e., the more links you have from authority sites, then higher your Trust Flow. Getting links from lower authority sites don’t help your Trust Flow as much.

In this article, I’ll describe what trust flow is, how it compares to domain authority and how you can use this metric to improve your SEO rankings.

What are Trust Flow and Citation Flow?

Trust Flow is a metric that measures how many links from high quality sites your site has. Getting a high volume of low quality links won’t improve a site’s Trust Flow score much.

Domain authority (created by Moz as an alternative to Google Pagerank) attempts to measure how authoritative a site by measuring the number of inbound links. Like Pagerank, links from high authority sites count more than links from lower authority sites.

However, one of the problems with domain authority is that a website can still achieve a high domain authority score if it has tons of low authority links.

To achieve high trust flow, however, you need to get links from high authority sites.

Majestic also created another metric called citation flow, which measures link popularity regardless of the quality of the site linking to you. So a site can have high citation flow if it has a lot of links from low authority sites, but trust flow will be low.

You can view Trust Flow and Citation Flow by signing up for an account with Majestic and then installing Majestic’s Backlink Analyzer Chrome Extension.

Topical Trust Flow

Topical Trust Flow refers to getting Trust Flow from sites that are relevant to your niche. Your website should be getting links from other sites within your niche that are creating content about related topics. It would look odd to search engines if your site is about nutritional supplements, but your topical flow suggested your site was about religion. Such inconsistencies can get your site de-indexed from the search engines.

Basically, be sure to get links from sites that are relevant to yours.

Studies and Examples on Trust Flow

Theoretically, to rank a website well, you want to have both high trust flow and high citation flow. Is trust flow really a good predictor of SEO success?

I did some searching and found a few resources…

Gillis Van Den Broeke from 90 Digital conducted a study on 1,000 randomly selected sites and found a strong correlation between Trust Flow and organic traffic. They also found that high citation flow also seems to correlate with more traffic, but having higher trust flow helped more.

I haven’t found many case studies on Trust Flow, but a member in Black Hat World mentioned that he was able to increase Trust Flow significantly to a low Trust Flow site with just one authority link.

Another case study I found involved a digital marketer who increased a client’s search rankings from being virtually invisible in the search engines to position #16 for competitive terms like “bathroom remodeling” and “kitchen remodeling”.

It makes sense that increasing Trust Flow would correlate to higher rankings. Authority sites are selective with who they link to, so getting links from high authority sites is likely to increase the trustworthiness of your site with search engines like Google.

How to Improve Search Traffic by Increasing Trust Flow

So how can you increase your website’s trust flow and improve your search traffic? Here are a few suggestions.

1) Create quality content – If you are doing content marketing, then create high quality content that other websites will want to link to. If you create something that really stands out, be sure to promote that content so that other sites will link to it.

2) Guest post on authority sites – Guest blogging is a great way to get links from authority sites. Focus on sites that have high Trust Flow and spend time creating an article that they will be proud to feature rather than writing lots of guest posts for low Trust Flow sites.

3) Get Press Coverage – Media coverage will help you if you are doing newsworthy events. Identify journalists that are covering similar businesses and events and reach out to them to let them know about your newsworthy event.

4) Build Relationships with Influencers – Spend time building real relationships with influencers while building your own influence. Engage them in conversation on channels where they are active and commenting on their blogs. Mention them in your own articles and make an effort to genuinely help them out.

5) Use mention monitoring and SEO software to track competitors – Using mention monitoring tools and backlink checkers to see where your competitors are getting their high Trust Flow links from. A few tools that include Trust Flow metrics are Majestic’s SEO suite, Monitor Backlinks and Scrapebox with the Metrics Checker paid add-on.

Summary

Many website owners focus on getting a large quantity of links because it’s easier to get links from a lot of low authority sites than it is to get a few high authority links. But high authority or Trust Flow sites can significantly help your SEO results.

While getting a large quantity of links can certainly help, be sure to focus some effort on getting high quality links as well.