Citation Flow & Trust Flow

 

There are complex algorithms used in the AI and machine learning behind Publisher Discovery. These operate on the list of around two million publisher websites held in our databases. As we've stated elsewhere the raw data is originally derived from MajesticSEO, the largest commercially available webmap. 

As part of that, we will shortly be incorporating these two metrics from our Majestic data source: 

• Citation Flow is a number of predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it.
• Trust Flow is a number predicting how trustworthy a page is based on how trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbours.

These will be fed into the algorithm and help to improve the relevance ranking still further. This means that as well as relevance to a specific vertical and/or country, there are indicators of the quality of the websites. 

Citation Flow

Citation Flow is a trademark of Majestic. Citation Flow is a score between 0-100 which helps to measure the link equity or "power" the website or link carries. Citation flow is used in conjunction with "Trust Flow". Links are not all created with equal weight - and because a strong link will have a relatively stronger influence on URLs, Citation Flow is based on strong, iterative mathematical logic.

Trust Flow

Trust Flow, a trademark of Majestic, is a score based on quality, on a scale between 0-100. Majestic collated many trusted seed sites based on a manual review of the web. Sites closely linked to a trusted seed site can see higher scores, whereas sites that may have some questionable links would see a much lower score.

One of the founders of Majestic, Dixon Jones has said: “The idea of using Citation Flow and Trust Flow to evaluate publishers and even people, rather than just pages on the web is really effective. Some people are all talk. Others are all Fiverr followers. But when a Publisher has influence, then it shows in these numbers. What’s more, digging into the numbers, you can see a direct channel to market, from the end buyer through the places and people that the publisher influences, to the publisher themselves. It is like having a telescope through the publisher to her audience and the people she influences. It’s brilliant.”

Further Reading

If you want to see more about these powerful metrics, there is a lot more detail on the Majestic website; or take a look a Majestic's own video:

The Publisher Discovery Team