Editorial Staff
Citation Flow or CF is an indicator to measure the popularity of a website without considering the quality of the links.
This means that a website can have a very high CF but it still has poor quality of backlink profile.
For example, adult sites tend to have very high CF with low DR.
This metric is scored from 0 to 100, while the higher a website’s CF is, the more popular the website is.
Same like trust flow, citation flow is developed by Majestic, a popular SEO and link analysis to check website’s SEO metrics.
In order to check your CF score of your website, you can either go straight to Majestic, or you can use any free metric checker.
How Does Citation Flow Works?
Although citation flow measure the number of backlinks to your domain, it doesn’t mean that if you have 1 millions backlinks, you’ll have a good citation flow.
Instead, it also take into the consideration of the amount of unique domains that linking to your domain.
Here’s the formula of citation flow:
A website can have multiple backlinks from the same external domain.
This is why, Majestic added another factor as measurement, which is the number of unique domains that referring to a website.
Here is the example:
As you can see above, Moz.com has more number of total backlinks than Majestic.com. However, Moz.com still has lower citation flow than Majestic.com.
This is because, Majestic.com has better ratio of total backlinks and unique domains as compared to Moz.com.
What is a Good Citation Flow?
The higher the CF, it indicates the higher number of unique domains that pointing to a website.
- 1 to 30 is considered a low CF score. This indicates that there are too many links that are coming from the same domain every time.
- 31 to 60 is considered a medium CF score.
- 61 to 100 is considered a good CF score. This indicates that a site has a good percentage of unique domain’s backlink.
Citation Flow and Trust Flow
Citation flow is best to use with other SEO metrics. One of the favorite metric to combine with citation flow is trust flow.
To combine citation flow and trust flow, we should count it as a ratio. For example, if your citation flow is 20 and your trust flow is 40, then the ratio is 1:2.
If the website has much higher citation flow than the trust flow, it indicates that the website acquired by tons of low quality links.
The ideal ratio between citation flow and trust flow is 1, but it is nearly impossible. Even the highest ratio (claimed by Google) is 98:99.
On average, the ratio of citation flow to trust flow should be 0.5. This should be the benchmark you wanna refer to.
