LINK METRICS · SEO GLOSSARY
Trust Flow
Majestic\'s proprietary metric measuring the quality of links pointing to a page or domain — based on proximity to a seed set of trusted websites. A high Trust Flow indicates links from sources Majestic considers highly trustworthy.
Definition
Trust Flow (TF) is a link quality metric developed by Majestic (majestic.com). It is calculated by measuring how close a URL\'s link graph is to a manually curated seed set of trusted websites — high-quality, established websites that Majestic\'s team has verified as trustworthy. Pages that are one link away from trusted seeds have very high Trust Flow; pages that are many hops removed from any seed have low Trust Flow. Trust Flow is measured on a scale of 0–100. It is paired with **Citation Flow** (CF), which measures link quantity (volume of links regardless of quality). The TF/CF ratio is used to assess link profile health: a ratio close to 1 (TF ≈ CF) suggests a balanced natural profile; a very low TF/CF ratio (many links but low trust) suggests many links from low-quality or spammy sources. Trust Flow and Citation Flow are Majestic proprietary metrics — they are not used by Google in its ranking algorithm and are not based on Google\'s data. They provide a third-party proxy for link quality assessment, particularly useful when GSC link data is limited.
Why it matters for SEO
Trust Flow is widely used in the SEO industry as a quick indicator of a domain\'s link authority quality and for prospecting link building targets (preferring link opportunities from sites with high TF). It\'s useful for comparing backlink quality across competitor domains, identifying low-TF links in your own profile as potential disavow candidates, and evaluating the quality of potential link building partners. Like Domain Authority (Moz) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs), Trust Flow is a proprietary metric that correlates with search ranking potential but does not directly represent any Google signal.
How DeepSEOAnalysis checks this
DeepSEOAnalysis does not provide Trust Flow data — Trust Flow is a proprietary metric from Majestic and requires a Majestic account or API access. For Trust Flow analysis, use Majestic\'s Site Explorer (majestic.com) or third-party tools that license Majestic data. DeepSEOAnalysis focuses on technical SEO signals derived from crawling pages directly rather than third-party link metrics.
GLOSSARY
Related terms
link metrics
Citation Flow
Majestic\'s proprietary metric measuring the volume of links pointing to a URL or domain — a quantity measure of link popularity, paired with Trust Flow (quality) to assess the overall character of a link profile.
Read definition →links
Domain Rating (DR)
Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs\'s proprietary metric scoring the strength of a website\'s backlink profile on a 0–100 logarithmic scale. A higher DR indicates a stronger, more authoritative backlink profile. DR is a third-party metric — Google does not use it in ranking, but it\'s widely used in the SEO industry as a proxy for a domain\'s link authority and a predictor of ranking competitiveness.
Read definition →links
Domain Authority (DA)
Moz\'s proprietary 1–100 metric predicting how likely a domain is to rank in SERPs, based on backlink quality and quantity. Not a Google metric.
Read definition →links
Link Profile
The complete set of backlinks pointing to a website — including referring domains, anchor text distribution, link quality, and dofollow/nofollow ratio — evaluated as a whole for authority and naturalness.
Read definition →links
Link Building
The practice of acquiring inbound backlinks from other websites to increase a page\'s PageRank and improve its ranking potential for target queries.
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