Introducing Trust Flow
Thursday 27th July 2020: Trust is important.
You want to have confidence in brands and there are hundreds of possible reasons for needing to be able to rely on them.
Maybe you want a brand to share your values so you can trust that your purchase is eco-friendly. Or you need to know that a company is keeping your data safe and secure. It could even be that you want to trust a product review as you can’t afford a bad purchase.
Whatever your reason for wanting to trust a brand, it also extends to the influencers they partner with. This is why every Twitter Profile in the Majestic Monitor index has its own score to measure how trustworthy it is, which is called Trust Flow.
In this article we will explore:
What is Trust Flow?
Trust Flow is a score between 0 and 100 which measures how trustworthy a page or website is by looking at the pages that link to it. Initial scores were given to a manually reviewed set of authority websites, and as they link out to other websites, some of that trust flows through it.
For the last 8 years, PR firms, digital agencies and domain name traders have used Trust Flow as an important metric to identify toxic links, negative seo attacks, and to measure the success of their link building campaigns.
If you want to learn more about the origins of Trust Flow, then you can read the launch post over on the Majestic.com blog.
We’ve mentioned links and linking a little bit, and that’s because it’s important for calculating Trust Flow, but what is a link?
What is a link?
A link is when one website links to another website, and within the SEO community, a link is commonly known as a backlink.
Backlinks are important as they can help users discover new websites, content and social media profiles. Links can also let journalists include a source within a story, point users to a product as part of a review, and even help users work their way around a website.
However, not all links are equal. Some links are seen as more valuable than others. A link from one website may be more valuable to you than a link from another.
But how do you know how valuable a link is? For the last 8+ years, Majestic.com has been giving a score to links to identify valuable links using Trust Flow.
How does Majestic Monitor use Trust Flow?
Trust Flow measures the trust and authority of a webpage as well as a website. This made it a no-brainer to use this score to measure the Twitter accounts of influencers and brands.
If an authoritative website links to an influencer, it shows that the website thinks they are relevant and trustworthy.
Because the purpose of Monitor is to look at how the Internet views influencers, strong signals like this are vital for confidently scoring a Twitter profile.
In the above image you can see a number of different NFL teams and players who each have their own Trust Flow scores. These are all calculated by looking at the strengths of the different websites that link to them.
The Trust Flow for the profiles of the Broncos, Panthers and Patriots are higher than those of the players, which will be because the websites that link to them will be more authoritative than the websites that link to the players.
So how do you know what a good Trust Flow score is?
What is a good Trust Flow score?
A good Trust Flow score varies across industries. To know what a good Trust Flow score is, it’s best to compare scores for accounts in the same industry. If you compare the Trust Flow of former U.S President Barack Obama, to the Trust Flow of British number 1 ranked female tennis star Johanna Konta, you can see a huge difference.
It’s important to compare accounts within the same industry, as this gives the Trust Flow score some context. Only then that you can make a judgement on what is a good score.
So if you compare former U.S President Barack Obama to current U.S President Donald Trump you can see a very different picture.
Now the 70 Trust Flow score for @BarackObama is similar to/slightly better than the score of 69 for @realDonaldTrump.
It’s the same when you compare Johanna Konta’s Trust Flow of 25 to the 31 Trust Flow of former world number 1 Naomi Osaka.
By comparing the Trust Flow scores of similar accounts, you can make a better informed decision on what is a good score.
How do I increase my Trust Flow?
The easiest way to increase Trust Flow is to get links from trusted websites.
However, that’s an oversimplified statement. There is an entire industry dedicated to getting links from websites. There are thousands of agencies who will do it for you, and guides for doing it yourself, (such as this wonderful Link Building Book from Paddy Moogan at Aira).
Essentially, if you get links from websites, then their Trust Flow will pass through those links and affect yours. A highly trusted website will pass more Trust Flow than a less trusted website. When Majestic generate their index, complex calculations measure the flow of trust between websites, and give every website and webpage their own Trust Flow score. This then rewards content and content producers that are linked to by trustworthy sites with a potentially higher score.
Having a healthy link profile is important as it shows that your account is ‘genuine’. If your account only has links with a high Trust Flow, it can be an indication of manipulation or over-engineering, and while that may not necessarily be true, a profile that also has links with low Trust Flow will look more natural.
If you want to start building links from websites to increase your Trust Flow, then you will want to use a tool to check the Trust Flow of a website and its pages.
How do I check the Trust Flow of a website?
The best way to check the Trust Flow of a website is to use Majestic.com.
While Majestic isn’t the only backlink checker out there, there are other tools that exist with their own separate metrics. The most well-known alternative is the Domain Authority score from our friends at Moz.
If a website has a ‘high DA’ or a ‘high Trust Flow’ score, then it can be an ideal to try to get a link from it. However, you also need to take into account the strength of the page that the link is on, and that is where Trust Flow shines, as it scores both websites and webpages.
How do I check the Trust Flow of an influencer?
The best way to check the Trust Flow of an influencer is to use Majestic Monitor.
This is because Majestic Monitor has been built from the ground up for influencer discovery and analysis.
If you take a look the profile for Dixon Jones, the Global Brand Ambassador for Majestic, you can see his Trust Flow in a big, bold number right next to his profile photo. Then you can make an instant comparison on if this is a good Trust Flow score or not, because some similar profiles to Dixon are shown over to the right.
You can also look at the profile for a brand, such as General Motors, and make the same comparisons.
Why are your search results not ordered by Trust Flow?
When you search for an influencer in Monitor one thing that might stand out is that the search results may appear to be in a random order.
This is because we don’t order them by Trust Flow, but instead we order the results by their relevance to the query, based on the websites that link to these profiles.
You can see an example of this here:
The benefit to this is that you will see the most relevant profiles to your query first, and not the accounts that are less related but have a higher Trust Flow. You can this if you order the above results by Trust Flow (in the table view):
Discuss
Do you have any timesavers for discovering or analysing influencers? We'd love to hear them! Let us know on Twitter (@MajesticMonitor).