Trust Flow

What Is Trust Flow?

Trust Flow helps you distinguish valuable link sources from low-quality ones during link building. A single backlink from a domain with high Trust Flow can accomplish more than a hundred links from spam sites. Use the metric as a prioritization tool for your outreach strategy and focus on industry portals, trade media, and established institutions.

Trust Flow is a metric from the link analysis tool Majestic that measures the trustworthiness of a domain based on its backlinks. Unlike pure link quantity metrics (like Citation Flow), Trust Flow evaluates link quality — links from trustworthy, authoritative sources increase the Trust Flow value more than a mass of links from low-quality sources. A website with high Trust Flow is seen by Google as trustworthy.

The mechanism is based on a network approach: Majestic identifies high-quality “seed” domains (like Wikipedia, BBC, Microsoft) and then evaluates how well a website is linked to them. The closer a domain is linked to these seed sites, the higher the Trust Flow. This logic is similar to Google’s own PageRank concept — Google also favors links from trustworthy sources. Trust Flow (0–100 scale) is therefore a useful indicator of domain quality.

In practice, SEO professionals use Trust Flow to evaluate link sources: a backlink from a domain with high Trust Flow is more valuable than a hundred links from spam blogs. When building links, focus on high-quality sources: industry authorities, established news outlets, universities. A guest post on a website with TF 45+ is more valuable than a hundred comment links. Trust Flow is a tool for prioritizing link-building targets and quickly assessing link opportunities.