Citation Flow
As you know, all websites link to other websites and vice versa and the number of links to your website is called the ‘Citation’. Your Citation flows and grows as your website is linked to by other websites in a chain reaction. Your website may be linked to from another website, but a completely different website can then link to that referrer’s page, that in turn links to your page – Thus the Citation grows.
Confused?? Think of it as a chain of websites that link to yours.
If a website links to your site has thousands of inbound links to it, that’s great! This is because its Citation is very high. But what if that site has been manipulated and has inbound links harvested? This is where ‘Trust Flow’ comes into force.
Trust Flow
Historically the more times you are cited on another website the better and the higher you will appear in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS). Webmasters therefore bought thousands of poor inbound links and were rewarded with high SERP ranks.
However nowadays, search engines are continually improving and are now checking the quality and quantity of the links to each site. Search engines give websites a trust index based on the quality of the links to them in turn. Search engine algorithms (code) spot the websites that are robot generated and or have poor/spam content and will give them a low trust index.
The Google Panda & Penguin algorithm changes changed the way that sites were indexed ensuring that low trust sites disappeared from the SERPs.
When combining Citation Flow and Trust flow, search engines determine your domain authority and will rank your content higher in their SERPs.
Removal of low trust inbound links
Your website will be penalised if you have a high quantity of low trust sites linking to it. These links can be ignored by telling search engines to ignore them, this is referred to as disavowing links.
Combining Citation Flow and Trust flow, search engines will rank your content higher in their SERPs.
What determines your position in the SERPs
Please read our blog reference ‘What determines your position in the Search Engine Results Pages‘.
By Pete Lister 12/04/2019
References / CITATIONS!
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
https://moz.com/blog/google-algorithm-cheat-sheet-panda-penguin-hummingbird
https://blog.majestic.com/company/trust-flow-and-citation-flow-the-lowdown-on-how-you-can-use-them/
