What is Trust Flow? Trust Flow is a ranking value between 0 and 100 that describes the perceived trustworthiness of a site based on the number of external backlinks a site receives. The higher the number, the greater the measure of perceived trust and so increasing ranking potential of that site. However, it is essential to be aware that this does not necessarily mean the more external links a site receives, the better it is. Instead, it is necessary to recognize how those links are arrived at and their nature.
Trust Flow is used by many search engines and is measured against the total number of inbound links from trusted sources. This is commonly thought to be the same as Quality Score and often is; however, there are many differences to note. First, we will only be looking at Trust Flow to measure the number of inbound links. In reality, a site may have high-quality and high-bound links but have a low-quality or low-bound backlink profile, meaning that they are neither high-quality nor high-bound and, as such, would fall outside of the definition mentioned above of Trust Flow. For more helpful information about your eCommerce business, try the eCom Elites course.
As Google’s definition states: “A quality score is calculated by measuring the effect of the Google Page Rank value of each link to a site. We do this by calculating the total number of inbound links from every trusted link, then dividing this number by the number of pages found on a site.” This is not the only way to calculate a Trust Flow score. Many search engines use the PR of that page in order to determine if a page has high quality links.
One way to check out exactly how well you’re doing when it comes to your Google Page Rank is to check out the Google Trends tool. When it comes to trust flow metrics, you should look closely at the Trends and whether or not you have a high number of high-quality links as well as a high amount of low quality links. You can also check out the link popularity of your main keyword phrase in order to see if you are performing well.
Many people mistakenly believe that there is only one type of link – a link with Google Page Rank, which is true. However, a link can also be a “nofollow” link – one that will not count towards your page rank. Examples of this include your direct and affiliate links on pages within your own website or blog. Low quality and low-bound links will not count towards your PR and will not affect your overall trust flow score.
If you want to get a true picture of your company’s online presence, you’ll want to check out the anchor text links that you have. The Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies reports recommends that you have at least two to three quality anchor text links within each of your webpages. Of course, these links cannot be under your primary domain name, but they can be located within a subdomain or even a separate website. Low quality and low-bound anchor texts will negatively impact your trust flow score, which is why many people focus on getting only authoritative and quality links.
An important factor to consider when evaluating your website’s topical search rankings is the total number of inbound links that point at your pages. Although this isn’t measured directly by any tool or metric, it can have a significant impact on your trust flow score. For example, if you have ten domains and you have a total of twenty pages, you should expect that roughly half of those links come from internal sources and half come from external sources. Therefore, using anchor text links that point at external sites can negatively impact your overall domain trust flow score.
Another important factor for many digital marketers is the relevance of the links that point at your pages. While high quality and authoritative links can have a big effect on your trust flow, low quality inbound links can have a devastating effect. In the past, it was easy for low quality domains to appear in the search engine results due to the fact that they were more likely to be older (the domains that are older tend to have less link juice and hence, lower inbound links). Today, many SEO services companies are using metric tools that take into consideration both the age of the domain as well as its relevancy to the query to analyze the relevancy of incoming links.