Trust Flow and Citation Flow: How to Read Majestic's Link Metrics
Most authority metrics give you one number. Majestic gives you two, and that's the reason many link builders still keep it in their toolkit. Trust Flow and Citation Flow separate how many links a site has from how trustworthy those links are, and comparing the pair catches problems a single score hides.
The two metrics in plain terms
Both are Majestic metrics on a scale of 0 to 100.
Citation Flow (CF) reflects how much link weight a site or URL has, based on the number of links pointing at it and the strength of the sites they come from. It's a measure of volume and influence. It doesn't care whether those links are good.
Trust Flow (TF) reflects how closely a site is linked to a hand-picked set of trusted seed sites. Majestic starts from sites it considers trustworthy and follows links outward. The fewer hops between a site and that trusted set, the higher its TF tends to be.
Put simply: CF asks "how many links point here, and how strong are they?" TF asks "how close is this site to the trustworthy part of the web?"
Why the ratio matters
On their own, each number is limited. Together they tell a story.
| Pattern | What it often suggests |
|---|---|
| TF and CF both moderate and close together | A normal site with a reasonable mix of links |
| TF well below CF | Lots of links, few of them from trusted parts of the web |
| TF close to or above CF | A smaller profile with good-quality links |
| Both very low | New site or almost no links |
Many practitioners use the TF/CF ratio as a quick filter. If a site has CF 45 and TF 8, that's a lot of link weight coming from places Majestic doesn't trust. Bulk directory links, comment spam, scraped pages and link networks create exactly this shape.
A ratio close to 1 doesn't prove a site is clean, and a low ratio doesn't prove it's spam. Plenty of sites in competitive commercial niches pick up junk links they never asked for. But a low ratio on a site you're about to get a link from is worth five minutes of investigation.
Topical Trust Flow
Majestic also classifies the links into topic categories, called Topical Trust Flow. A site's profile might show its strongest TF under Health/Medicine, with smaller amounts under Business and Shopping.
This is helpful when you're vetting relevance at scale. Suppose you run a tiffin service directory in Mumbai and you're assessing a food blog as a guest post prospect. If its Topical Trust Flow is dominated by Recreation/Food, the site's link profile matches what it claims to be. If its strongest topic is Gambling or Adult while the content is about recipes, someone has probably bought or repurposed the domain. That mismatch is a common sign of an expired domain rebuilt to sell links.
Where these metrics are useful
Screening link prospects. When you have a long list of sites, sort by TF and look at the TF/CF ratio before checking anything else. It removes obvious junk quickly.
Checking expired domains. If someone offers you a domain with high CF but tiny TF and a Topical Trust Flow that doesn't match its history, you're looking at a domain with a messy past.
Spotting problems in your own profile. If your CF climbs over a few months while TF stays flat, you're picking up volume without quality. Find out where it's coming from, whether that's a past vendor, automated scraper sites or someone pointing junk at you.
Comparing pages, not just domains. Majestic reports TF and CF at the URL level too. A guest post page with TF 0 on a domain with TF 30 tells you the page itself carries little.
Where they fall short
Majestic's index is its own. Like Moz and Ahrefs, it sees a sample of the web, so a site's real link profile may look quite different from what any tool reports.
TF also depends on Majestic's seed list, which isn't public. You're trusting their idea of trustworthy.
And neither metric looks at traffic, content quality or whether a link was paid for. A site can have a respectable TF and still sell sponsored posts to anyone with a credit card, which Google's spam policies treat as a link scheme when those links pass ranking credit. For more on combining metrics, see Domain Rating vs Domain Authority.
A practical vetting routine using TF and CF
- Pull TF, CF and Topical Trust Flow for each prospect.
- Flag any site where TF is less than about half of CF for a closer look. Treat this as a rough rule of thumb rather than a hard limit.
- Flag any site where the leading Topical Trust Flow category doesn't match its content.
- For flagged sites, open recent posts and check outbound links. Are they relevant, or a parade of unrelated commercial anchors?
- Check estimated organic traffic in another tool. Real sites tend to have real visitors.
- Only then look at price, placement and anchor options.
This takes a few minutes per site and saves you from links that look fine on a domain score but sit in a poor neighbourhood. Our guide to good vs bad backlinks covers the manual signs in more detail.
Using TF and CF for tiered links
If you use tiered structures, TF and CF help you decide which properties deserve support. A Tier 1 page with decent TF in your topic is a reasonable candidate. A Tier 1 page with very low TF and inflated CF is already carrying a messy profile, and adding more bulk links on top makes it messier. The tiered link building risks article covers why that matters.
Run your own domain through Majestic's free lookup today and note your TF, CF and top Topical Trust Flow category. If the leading topic isn't what your site is about, start by finding out which links are pulling it elsewhere.