Editorial Staff
Trust flow or TF is an indicator to measure trustworthiness of a website based on the quality of backlinks of the website.
In other word, the trustworthiness of a website is depends on the quality of the sites that link to you.
It is scores between 0 to 100, while the higher a website’s trust flow is, indicates that the higher quality of the backlinks that a website has.
Please be remind that the score of the trust flow does not indicates the number of the quality backlinks that you have.
For example, a trust flow score of 10 does not indicates that you have 10 high quality backlinks.
Trust flow metric was developed by Majestic, a popular SEO and link analysis to check website’s SEO metrics.
In order to check your TF score of your website, you can either go straight to Majestic, or you can use any free metric checker.
How Does Trust Flow Works?
There are 2 main processes of how Majestic determine the trust flow score of every website:
Stage #1: Seed Sites
First, the trust flow metric collected the most credible sites in the internet as their benchmark.
These benchmark sites are what they called as the “Seed Sites”.
These sites are Wikipedia, Forbes, New York Times, Washington Post, and other super-high authority sites.
These “Seed Sites” have the perfect TF score because they are extremely strict in providing external links to others and have high standard of editorial contents.
Normally, these “Seed Sites” will only link to other “Seed Sites” to maintain their SEO metrics quality.
It is almost impossible to find these seed sites linking to some bad and not trusted sites.
Stage #2: Determine How Close a Website Linked From the Seed Sites
Now, Majestic trust flow will analyze how close your website to these “Seed Sites” in the link chain.
Take a look on below illustration:
From the above illustration, website A gained the highest TF since website A has a direct backlink from the seed site.
The TF impact on website B and C is lower as compared to website A, since website B and C do not have the direct backlink from the seed site.
The concept of trust flow can be illustrated in the real life sample:
Let’s say you are the boss of a company and you have John that has been working for you for 20 years.
You had a full trust on John since you already know his capability, loyalty, and professionalism.
One day, John refers his friend Alex to work in your company.
By natural, you will still trust his recommendation. However, the level of trust you give to Alex is not as much as how you trusted John.
Afterwards, Alex recommend Allyson, and Allyson recommend Brahm. How sure you can trust Allyson and Brahm?
Exactly! The further the person’s link to John, the lesser trust you will have.
This is because you don’t know how reliable are them.
This is exactly how the trust flow determine the trust level on every websites.
As a site owner, getting a backlink from the seed sites should be your main goal since you will gain a juice of TF value.
Topical Trust Flow
Topical trust flow is the sub section of TF that filter the score based on the website category or topic.
The topical TF provides more specific metric on how trusted a website for specific categories.
Based on the above picture, bbc.com has the highest topical TF in ‘Arts / Television’ category, while it only has 45 TF in the ‘Sports / Soccer’ category.
What is a Good Trust Flow Score?
A TF score below 10 is considered poor.
The average score of TF is between 10 to 49.
A TF score of 50 and higher is considered good.
Seed sites are likely have TF score between 80 to 100.
How does Trust Flow Important to SEO?
Although TF is not a ranking factor used by Google, trust flow is considered one of the top metrics to measure a website’s value.
It is important for website owners to understand and know how to improve this metric.
With TF metric, you can identify a potential link building, save your time and money from getting a backlink from poor quality sites, and do the backlink audit. You will learn more about these sections in the future lesson.
