What is the difference between trust flow and citation flow?

Both trust flow and citation flow are important to take into account when monitoring your link building campaign. They can get confusing for some, but here are their differences.

Trust Flow

Trust flow is the number of high-quality and trustworthy backlinks that your website currently has. If a reliable and valid source links back to your website, you will see this metric increase.

Citation Flow

Citation flow refers to the total number of backlinks that are linked to your website, regardless of quality. So, if your trust flow increases, you’ll also see a spike in your citation flow. On the other hand, if your citation flow increases, you may not necessarily see an increase in trust flow.

Put simply, if you want to improve your link building strategy, you should pay closer attention to trust flow than citation flow, because that is the metric you want to see rise.

You’ll notice that trust flow is consistently lower than citation flow, but this is because of the number of links that citation flow takes into consideration.

Knowing the differences between these two can help you more efficiently monitor and manage your link building campaigns. You’ll be able to better gauge which links are worth maintaining and which you might want to update or remove.