According to Majestic, “Trust Flow is one of the Majestic Flow Metrics, which is weighted by the number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites to a given URL, or Domain.” In Laymen’s terms, Majestic determines the score based on the traffic that flows through a link, the relevancy of the linking site, and the links linking to the linking site.

What is Topical Trust Flow?

Based on our testing, Topical rating is based on the relevancy of links going to any given website. This variation of the metric is incredibly accurate and we use it for every link building campaign.

Competitor Analysis

We use Majestic Trust Flow to sift through competitors link profiles to see which ones are worth acquiring. As a rule of thumb, we only pay attention to links that are Topically relevant. So, let’s say I wanted to rank for keyword “weight loss programs.”

Before jumping in and analyzing competitors links, we want to make sure that we’re only analyzing competitors that have topically relevant links. A site that’s ranking without topically relevant links is futile and more than likely fueled by spam. Don’t waste your time looking at these sites.

Link Prospecting

Majestic Trust Flow is an amazing metric for qualifying potential link opportunities. It can also be used for finding relevant guest posts, directories, resource lists, forums, expired domains, or pretty much anything. So, if you’re searching for guest post opportunities, simply toss the sites into the “Bulk Backlinks” option and follow the same steps I listed above to sift through them. You’ll now have an amazing list of relevant link opportunities that are going to drive your rankings up.

You can also gather a list of directories to see if they are worth submitting your site to.

Keep in mind, Majestic and the Trust Flow metric are not always 100% reliable. People using private blog networks have the ability to block Majestic from crawling their websites. That means when you perform a competition analysis, you will not see the links. Unfortunately there is really no solution to this issue unless Majestic figures out a way to get through the bot blockers. Only a small percentage of people doing SEO use private blog networks to rank, so you may or may not run into this.

Obviously Google isn’t using Majestic’s metric, but they are using relevancy as a way to eliminate networks. Private Whois, different personalities, internal links, and whatever other garbage people say “protects” networks is just fluff. The only consistent strategy that protects a network site from being deindexed is to have content and outbound links that are relevant to the domain’s Topical Trust Flow.

If your website is about “health” and all of your PBN sites have “Health” as your Topical TF, it’s nearly impossible for Google to find your network unless you get a manual review.

Moral of the story: if you’re going to use a private blog network, make sure the content, outbound links and Topical Trust Flow are relevant to your money site. Not only does it keep your site safer, but your network will be way more effective.