What is a citation flow?

Citation Flow shows how many backlinks point to your website. The more links, the higher the Citation Flow.

What is a Citation Flow?

Citation Flow (CF) is a statistical representation of the number of backlinks pointing to your website. It gives a score from 0 to 100 and shows how influential a website can be based on the number of sites that link to it. The quality of the links is further apart from this. The more links pointing to your website, the higher the CF is. The moment a backlink itself also has a high CF, this will weigh more heavily and therefore exert more influence on the CF of your website.

You can measure this with the online tool Majestic. With Majestic you can look at both the Citation Flow and the Trust Flow (TF). You can also gain insight into the number of backlinks.

What is TrustFlow?

Trust Flow is a quality score that can also give a score from 0 to 100. The quality score indicates whether the link comes from a reliable site. When websites have a lot of backlinks from reliable sites, the Trust Flow will get a high score. Backlinks that are questionable or simply not reliable get a low score.

The CF and TF together make up Majestic’s flow metric algorithm.

Relationship between Citation Flow and Trust Flow

The Trust Ratio (TR) indicates the relationship between CF and TF. The Trust Ratio is calculated by dividing the TF by the CF. A website is perfect when the score of the Trust Ratio is 1, because 100/100 = 1. The Trust Ratio shows that it is important that both the Citation Flow and the Trust Flow must both score high. A high CF and a low TF indicate that a website contains many backlinks, but these are not reliable. The website is then seen as spam.

Formula of Trust Ratio: TR = TF/CF