Citation Flow and Trust Flow: Everything You Should Know

Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics of your website, do they sound some foreign terms? As, you  might have heard about trust in relationships. But does it happen in websites or blogs also? Not a problem, as I was also sailing on the same boat. I also surprised seeing these terms when was doing online SEO research online on search engines metrics. Every time I searched for these two fancy terms on internet, I got more curious. But one fine day I had gathered so much information on them that I thought to share with you all. We know that are many search engines but Google dominates them all. Search engine is a one where one makes a search for something. For example, you want to know about “blogging tips”, “earning online”  etc. online you would put these keywords on the search engines. In return, the search engine would present you the links clicking on which you would land the respective page with information. Every website wants to come on first page of a search engine. No one wants to come in the second or subsequent pages on the search engines. For this, they do a lot of analysis, SEO marketing like tips. Collecting backlinks is one of the important factor of your website ranking. Also check the 7 fast tip to improve the flow metrics of your website

Importance of Google secondary metrics: Trust Flow, Citation Flow

Earlier website page rank was the potent reason to see the importance of any website. More the page rank on a scale of 0 to 10, the more powerful the website used to be considered earlier. With time Google has started giving importance to flow metrics. It considers now metrics like domain authority, Trust Flow and Citation Flow. These factors make it easy for Google to rank or place a website based on its importance. These are also called secondary metrics Let us discuss more in details about the two important terms, Trust Flow and Citation Flow in this article.

What is Citation Flow?

Citation Flow is a metric which is designed to check how influential a link pointing to a website is. A website can have multiple links pointing to it, and all these links are called backlinks. The more a website has incoming links, the more Citation Flow metrics it will have. This metrics does not matter whether all those incoming links to a website are of good quality or bad. For this the quantity matters more than the quality. Citation Flow tells the popularity of your website and improves as the backlinks improves. The point worth mentioning here is that these backlinks need not to be of high quality for Citation Flow. As Citation flow just considers the quantity of links and not the quality. For example, Citation Flow of a porn website can be more as more people lots of people might hit it. But that does not mean they all are of high quality. Citation Flow just indicates the popularity of your website and not the quality.

To measure the quality of a website, there is a mother flow metrics called “Trust Flow”.

What is Trust Flow?

Trust flow is in actual a unique but important metric that measures the quality of links. When your website has many links and all the links are of high quality, Trust flow of the website increases. Thus, unlike Citation flow, Trust Flow measures the quality of the links pointing to your website which is very important. We have written a separate article on how to get more traffic to your website. 

Citation Trust vs Trust Flow

One of the similarity between Citation Flow and Trust Flow is that both are represented on a scale of 1-100. Let us discuss about the differences now.

• We should understand one thing that when there is any increase in Trust Flow, Citation Flow also increases but vice versa does not happen always. It means, increase in Citation flow does not mean that all the links are trusted ones.
• Both Citation Flow and Trust Flow play an important role in maintaining the power of your website. One maintains the quality while other quantity.
• As we all know that SEO is majorly a game of backlinks. And, more the quantity, increase in the traffic on your website. But one thing that matters the most is that the backlinks should be from high authoritative source, otherwise, Citation Flow will increase only but not the Trust Flow.

What should be the ratio of Citation Flow and Trust Flow?

It is good to check the ratio between the two important metrics mentioned here. For example, if the Citation Flow is 10 and Trust Flow is 20,the ratio is 1:2. The highest ratio is 0:9 which is normally very difficult to achieve but there are still websites like Google, Facebook etc that have such high ratio. On the other hand average ratio of Trust flow to Citation Flow should be 0.50. The best ratio seems to be 1. Average trust to citation flow ratio should be 0.50. The ratio improves and degrades based on the quality of links to a website.

What should we do if Trust Flow increases and not Citation Flow?

When Citation Flow is increasing and not Trust flow, sometimes it’s a sign of warning also. And, efforts should be done to check the quality of your backlinks. It is good to have more quality but not at the sake of quality. ______________________________________________________________________ Thus it is clear from above that now with the exclusion of page rank, Google now gives more attention to the other metrics like Domain Authority, Trust Flow and Citation Flow. So one should work towards lot of high quality back links. As this will also improve rest of the metrics. Also Read: Top 10 SEO Practices to get your website on top search results 4 Important Factors Responsible to Rank Website on Search Engines? How to get more traffic to your website? Rise Above the Competition: 5 Advanced Content Promotion Strategies in SEO Keyword strategy criteria for your website Sitebulb- Website crawling tool for digital marketing List of Best websites for guest posting 5 Advanced content promotion strategies in SEO Citation flow and Trust flow- Know everything Online Business Directory Listing – Are they helpful? 7 Fast tips to increase flow metrics to your website 8 Simple tips to get more Youtube subscribers Importance of videos for your online business