Trust Flow Explained: What It Is and How to Improve It

What is Trust Flow?

Trust Flow (TF) is a metric developed by Majestic SEO that measures the quality of links pointing to a website. Unlike metrics that focus on quantity, Trust Flow specifically evaluates how trustworthy a site's link neighborhood is.

Majestic calculates Trust Flow by starting with a manually curated seed set of trusted websites (like BBC, Wikipedia, and major universities). Sites that are linked to by these seed sites receive high Trust Flow. Sites linked by those sites get slightly less, and so on — creating a "trust cascade" throughout the web.

Trust Flow vs Citation Flow

Majestic provides two companion metrics:

• Trust Flow: Measures quality of links (how trustworthy they are)
• Citation Flow: Measures quantity of links (how many links point to you)

The ratio between TF and CF is important. A healthy site typically has a TF:CF ratio close to 1:1. If your CF is much higher than your TF, it suggests you have many links but from low-quality sources.

How to Improve Trust Flow

Since TF measures link quality, improving it requires earning links from trustworthy sources:

• Get links from educational (.edu) and government (.gov) domains
• Earn mentions from major news publications
• Build links from well-established industry websites
• Remove or disavow toxic backlinks that drag down your TF
• Focus on topical relevance — links from sites in your niche carry more trust

At SEO Growth, our Trust Flow packages specifically target high-TF sources to build a trustworthy link profile that Majestic recognizes and rewards.