Citation flow
The number of backlinks pointing to your website can be translated into the metric called: citation flow. Your citation flow is higher, the more links point to your website. In addition, a backlink itself can also have a high citation flow. This makes it even more effective over the entire citation flow of your website.
Another metric that goes along with citation flow is trust flow. Trust flow measures the reliability of a backlink. Security and reliability are very important components for your search engine ranking. Google wants the Google Page Experience to recommend a high-quality Web site to users.
Majestic tool for citation flow
A useful tool for measuring citation flow is the Majestic tool. This tool displays the two metrics, citation flow and trust flow. You can also see the number of backlinks in total and all unique backlinks in the Majestic tool. Using the results in Majestic, you can improve your findability in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!
It is important to have a good mix of trust flow and citation flow on your Web site. Above you can see two examples of a graph about the trust flow (TF) and citation flow (CF) of two Web sites. On the left you can see a good mix of both and on the right a bad mix.
The first difference is the amount of backlinks, which is significantly higher on the left. But the biggest problem is that in the left example, there are too many CF links pointing to a particular domain with no value/reliability. When search engines navigate your website, backlinks with no value will have a negative effect on your place in search results. Therefore, it is important to pay as much attention to both trust and citation flow as possible.
