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How To Increase Trust Flow

   

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Trust Flow is the creation of Majestic SEO and is yet another means of determining the authority of a website. It’s also referred to as “citation flow.”

How important is Trust Flow?

At We Outreach, we don’t think these metrics are too important. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention and know what it means because it can help you determine the authority of websites you’re reaching out to for backlinks. 

Researching TF can also help you learn where you stand against your competition. If you’re trying to rank for a keyword and the top ranking competitors have a TF of 75, you can generally assume you’ll need a similar TF if you plan to rank. 

Let’s look at the TF metric and how you can use it in your SEO backlink strategy. 

What is Trust Flow?


Trust Flow or citation flow is a score of 0 to 100 based on the quality of a website’s link profile. The TF metric was created by Majestic SEO, a search engine optimization tool designed to analyze and determine the websites with the highest quality links.

Majestic crawls websites and uses an unknown list of seed sites to determine the quality of the site in question. 

The closer a website is linked to a “seed site,” the higher the trust flow score. 

Understanding the trust flow metric is also a great way to determine the value of links you’re trying to receive to your site. The higher the trust flow of the site, the higher the perceived value of that link. 

In this example, we used shopify.com to see the trust flow of the ecommerce brand. It has a score of 82 with billions of inbound links. You can see the metrics on the page above.

Backlinks from Shopify would be great; we all know that. But you can still use Majestic to get an idea of the authority of a website.  

This is a factor that makes trust flow (citation flow) interesting. Basically, you want your website’s link profile to be as good as these manually-chosen, unknown seed sites.  

We put Facebook.com into the Majestic tool and noticed that they have a 99 trust flow score. This tells us that Facebook is about as close to a “seed” site as possible. 

Trust Flow vs. Ahrefs DR

There are a lot of ways to determine website authority. Domain Rating from Ahrefs, Domain Authority from Moz, and Trust Flow from Majestic are all tools that try to figure out what Google is thinking. 

It’s important to understand that these are just tools, so you’ll want to take these ratings with a grain of salt. 

That said, we prefer Ahrefs because they’re recognized for having more data which we believe provides more accuracy in their ratings. 

In the image above, you can see an example of trust flow according to Majestic. We used Facebook to see how close it is to a seed site.

In this image, you can find the domain rating of Facebook according to Ahrefs. Both of these metrics show that Facebook is a well respected site, as I’m sure we already knew. 

The ratings are basically the same and based on their own individual factors. Both use link data and authority to determine the overall score. 

Trust Flow vs What Google Actually Wants 

We’ve expressed our skepticism multiple times when it comes to all these variable ratings that you use to determine the authority of your site. 

All in all, they’re not Google, and they never will be. No one can know exactly what Big G wants, and all these SEO tools try replicating the algorithm. 

Some come close, some closer than others. But, it all boils down to chasing high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites. 

If you do the right things and build a backlink profile properly, you have nothing to worry about.

Google wants to see that you obtain high-quality links from relevant sites that have a good backlink profile of their own. 

This content speaks to a pain point or issue that someone is having in their life and provides them with a solution. Actionable articles like the one above on weight loss provide direct tips and guidelines to follow for someone who is looking to change their life. 

How To Increase Trust Flow / Citation Flow

As we briefly noted, trust flow is nothing more than a fabricated score given to websites by a tool. As an SEO, you likely know what to do to increase your site’s authority. 

Use SEO metrics like trust flow, domain rating, and domain authority to determine what sites you want to target for a guest post or linking exchange. 

The key to increasing your trust flow is creating high-quality backlinks from high authority sites with good metrics and authoritative content. 

Use relevant anchor text on your links, don’t put backlinks on spammy sites, avoid black hat tactics, and do this consistently. 

At We Outreach, we have a very concrete view of what a good backlink is, and we use it as a framework for all of our outreach and link building. 

Here’s what we think you should do if you want to build quality backlinks and increase trust flow without even having to know your score: 

Build Amazing, Link-Worthy Content 

It all starts with creating content that people enjoy and feel informed by. If you’re pumping out content that is useless, uninformative, and boring, no one will want to give you a link. 

You also want to make sure that your SEO content speaks to a direct and concise audience. Doing so will make your outreach easier, and the site you’re asking to link to you will see that the content is useful to their audience. 

Informational Pieces

There is a reason why certain websites get a ton of links without even having to reach for them. It’s because they create incredible informational content that is keyword-optimized. 

Most importantly, informational content needs to say something that not everyone else is saying

Data Driven Pieces

Articles that contain a lot of data end up in the search engine when someone is looking for a resource to back up a claim. These pieces of content earn a lot of links as well because of this. 

Roundups like the one above serve as a master resource for people looking for data on a specific topic. 

If you’re trying to get backlinks to recent posts on upcoming real estate trends, you might refer to this article for data, information, and sources that you can use to enhance your article. 

This content becomes a resource for several other articles, and it earns a ton of links automatically. 

When the content earns links, the trust metrics go up, and generally, so does your ranking in search. 

Data Visualizations 

Above is an infographic about the spectrum of AI and how it’s changed over time. Providing graphic resources like this can dramatically increase your chances of getting more links. 

An image like this would be difficult to duplicate, and using this in your pitch to relevant sites would show that you’ve put a lot of time and effort in before even reaching out.

Free Tools

Ubersuggest is a freemium keyword research tool offered by Neil Patel. You’re allowed a certain number of limited access keyword searches before you have to start paying to use it. 

This is a great strategy to get people in the door and have them check out what you’re offering before you profit off of them. 

It’s also a great strategy to get eyes on the web page when you’re reaching out for backlinks. You’re providing a ton of value by offering a useful tool and expecting nothing more than linking.

Use The Right Link Building Tactics

Once you have high-quality, useful content, it’s time to reach out to prospects using the most efficient methods. 

There are a number of ways to earn high authority links; here are some of our top choices:  

Guest Posting 

Guest posting is always a favorable option when reaching out for links because the value proposition is clear. This is especially true if you have niche expertise on your own blog.

We write a great blog post for your website, and you give us a link; it’s simple. If you already have awesome content on your site, you can use that to build trust when asking for a guest post.

Link Exchanges

A link exchange can save you time because you don’t have to write a post. If you already have a large number of contacts that you can reach out to for links, you can leverage that to create more opportunities.

In this example, you will reach out to multiple domains getting links to one website, which links to another, which links to another, which ultimately links to you. You essentially say you want to get them links in your pitch. 

Paying for Links 

Buying backlinks is the most straightforward strategy to get one, but you want to be careful if a site allows you to pay them for links. Chances are, they provide backlinks to everyone, which means the site probably doesn’t have a high trust flow score, and a backlink from that site won’t impact your rankings much. 

There are also link building services you can find on the web that help build backlinks to specific pages or domains using keywords you provide. Hiring services like this can help drive more organic traffic to your web pages while increasing your ranking.