What Is Majestic TF And CF? All You Need To Know

According to a recent analysis of about 11.8 million Google search results by Backlinko – “A website’s link authority has a strong correlation with higher rankings in Google.”

Links backlinks – both qualitative as well as quantitative – have been an important ranking factor for Google Search Engine. It falls under the top ranking factors. So, you may wonder how it is that Google calculates and decides which website has more quality links and which should rank higher. Today, we’ll try to understand that.

Let’s go a decade back when PageRank was an algorithm which was used by Google Search so as to rank webpages. Thus, the link structure of a website was used to calculate a web page’s quality ranking. 2015 saw the end of the Google PageRank metrics and there was a shift of focus towards secondary metrics which rank and determine the authority of the websites. One such metrics is the Flow Metrics launched by Magestic SEO way back in 2012. Flow metrics gives you all the ‘Link Intelligence Data’, nowing which you can rule your market. It consists of two categories – Trust Flow i.e. TF and Citation Flow i.e. CF. Let’s look at the details

What is Majestic TF?

The Majestic Trust Flow is a metric which determines the quality of the links that point to a URL. Thus, the TF tells how much trustworthy a link is, based upon the quality of the backlinks that point towards it. Trust Flow is how close the backlinks are to trustworthy sources.

What is Majestic CF?

The Majestic Citation Flow is a metric which shows the quantity of the links that point to a URL. Thus, the CF tells how much influential a link is, based on the quantity of the links pointing towards it. Citation Flow is the link juice.

Trust Flow VS Citation Flow:

The major difference between TF and CF is that of quality and quantity respectively. CF does never consider the quality of a link. If you are to consider their co-relation, if there is an increase in TF, it means the CF will also be on an increase. However, if the CF increases, it does not mean that the TF will increase too. This is because, a specific site can have a large number of backlinks i.e. high quantity. However, not all of those will have high trust i.e. high quality. It is possible that you meticulously work to get only high quality backlinks, however some poor quality backlinks can get automatically generated. In short, the CF will mostly be high than that of the TF

Speaking of the difference between both the metrics, there is another factor of importance in determining the overall trust of the site – the Trust Ration

The Trust Ratio:

Trust Ratio (TR) is the ratio between the two flow metrics i.e. between the Trust Flow and the Citation Flow. Therefore, TR = TF/CF. As the CF will be higher than that of the TF, the nearer the Trust Ratio is to that of 1, the more it is desirable for websites. This means, higher the ratio, higher is the trustworthiness of the site. Thus, the maximum ratio is mostly 0.9. And yes, on an average, the ratio of ½ or 0.5 is acceptable, however a less than that ratio is not acceptable.

Measuring the TF, CF, and TR:

While Trust Flow and Citation Flow are the flow metrics, the Trust flow checker, and the Citation flow checker are the Majestic SEO Tools which are used to measure the TF and CF. Thus, they measure the trustworthiness of your web pages so that you know your present performance, and can decide upon how to go about improving it. The TF and CF Checker measures them in the form of a graph – the TF is represented as vertical lines and the CF is represented as horizontal lines on the graph.

You can simply go to Magestic SEO website, put in the URL for which you wish to measure the Trust and Citation Flow, and search. It then presents you with the backlink profile and the Flow metrics of the URL which you typed in. Magestic does have some policies for not-registered users, free account registered users, etc. Also, there are other Checker tools available which can let you do a comparison of the flow metrics of more than one URL at the same time. And yes, talking about measuring TF, remember that a TF which is less than 15 is considered as not ‘Trustworthy’.

Conclusion:

Majestic TF and CF are metrics which measure the backlinks that a URL or website gets – on the basis of quality as well as quantity. Getting high TF and CF will always be good, but if not, that is not the end of the world. ,If you are able to rank higher for more keywords, and are able to generate more traffic through these keywords, you need not to be worried. Because, technically speaking, High TF scores and high search rank are not depended on each other.