What Is Majestic SEO?

Somebody forwards a prospect list. One column reads TF. The next reads CF. Nothing in the email explains why there are two of them.

Majestic SEO is a British link intelligence tool. It crawls the web, then stores what it finds in an index of backlinks.

That covers the definition. Those two columns are where the method actually lives.

The Name Everybody Searches Is the Old Name

Type Majestic SEO into Google and the site you land on is called Majestic. Just Majestic. The company dropped the SEO off its name over a decade ago.

That old name still gets searched. Habit outlives branding.

Worth knowing what the rename admitted. Majestic never tried to be a full SEO suite. Its crawler goes out, follows links, records them. Rank tracking and site audits belong mostly to other vendors, and the product has never pretended otherwise.

So the accurate description is a link index with a login on top of it. One narrow job, done at enormous scale. That framing matters later, once the numbers start looking like verdicts.

One Crawler, Two Indexes

Here is the detail that ruins most Majestic screenshots.

Majestic publishes its data in two separate indexes. The Fresh Index holds recent crawl data. Its Historic Index reaches back years and holds far more of it.

Same domain, same tool. Two different link counts, depending on which tab was open when somebody hit export.

Pull a report from the Historic Index and the referring domain total swells. Links that died in 2019 can still sit in there. Pull the Fresh Index instead. Now you get something closer to what exists today.

Neither number is lying. They answer different questions.

Nobody labels the screenshot, though. A supplier quoting four thousand referring domains has not told you which index produced that. Ask them. On an old domain the two indexes diverge badly.

Trust Flow and Citation Flow Arrive as a Pair

Now the two columns.

Citation Flow measures influence by volume. More links pointing in, higher the number climbs. It holds no opinion about where those links came from.

Trust Flow works from a seed instead. Majestic picked a set of sites it considers trustworthy, reviewed by people rather than by a formula. Trust Flow then measures how much separation sits between your site and that seed set. Close to the seeds, high score. Buried behind ten hops of junk, low one.

Both scores stop at one hundred. The scale is logarithmic. Climbing from thirty to forty costs far more work than climbing from ten to twenty.

Read either one alone and you have thrown away the design.

The Gap Between Them Is the Whole Reading

This is what the two-column spreadsheet was trying to show you.

Take a domain scoring forty-five on Citation Flow. Trust Flow comes back at six. Volume with nothing standing behind it.

Plenty of links, almost no proximity to anything reviewed. Somebody built that profile rather than earned it.

Now flip the pair. Trust Flow of twenty-two against a Citation Flow of twenty-five. Modest link count, clean neighbourhood. A local business site that has quietly been around.

Practitioners watch the ratio for exactly this reason. Trust Flow sitting well below Citation Flow is the shape a bought profile makes. The two numbers were published together because that comparison is the diagnostic.

A single authority score cannot do this at all. Nothing to compare it against.

Topical Trust Flow Answers What a Score Cannot

Majestic also breaks Trust Flow down by subject category. Topical Trust Flow, in the interface.

Say a Calgary plumbing site carries a respectable Trust Flow. Fine so far. Then the topical breakdown shows its strongest category sitting under gambling rather than home services.

That mismatch is worth more to you than the score was.

One caveat sits underneath the categories, though. Majestic assigns them from link data rather than from reading your pages. A site that once ran a directory section can carry a category nobody there recognizes. Read the linking pages before accepting the label.

Topical data settles prospecting arguments quickly too. A page with authority in the wrong category makes a poor place to want a link from, whatever its headline number says. Relevance turns up as a category here rather than as a feeling.

Somebody Will Say This Is Domain Authority Renamed

Reasonable objection. It also proves the point rather than denting it.

Moz built Domain Authority as one blended figure, meant to predict how a site will rank. One number, one purpose.

Majestic publishes two. Neither one claims to predict a ranking.

That refusal is the whole difference. A prediction score wants to be read alone, since a second number would only muddle the forecast. Diagnostics want a partner. You cannot spot volume-without-trust inside a single blended figure, because the blending already destroyed the evidence.

So yes, both are vendor metrics with no official standing. The similarity ends at the count.

No Third-Party Index Is Google’s Index

Worth stating plainly. Majestic knows what Majestic crawled.

Its index is enormous. It is still not Google’s index. No vendor anywhere has that one.

Links Majestic never reached do not appear in your report. Ones it found years ago may still show, long after the page went dark. Every backlink tool carries that same limitation, expensive ones included.

Sample size explains most of the disagreement between vendors. Run one domain through two backlink indexes and the totals rarely match. Neither crawler saw the same web on the same day. So pick an index and stay with it. At least then your trend line means something.

Which makes Trust Flow a Majestic opinion about your site. A useful opinion, informed by a very large crawl. Still a view from outside the system that actually ranks you.

Treat the number as evidence rather than as a grade. Nobody at Google has ever looked at it.

Read Your Own Profile Before Paying for a Seat

Skip the subscription for twenty minutes. Do this part first.

Open Search Console. Go to the Links report, then read the top linking sites. Count how many of them you can actually account for.

Look at the anchor text list next. Anchors in a language you do not sell in. Vocabulary from some other industry entirely. Either pattern means somebody else built part of your profile.

Check whatever Majestic currently gives away on a domain lookup after that. Free allowances move around, so read the plan page rather than an old blog post. One glance at Trust Flow against Citation Flow still tells you which half of the story your own profile belongs to.

Do the same lookup on two competitors while you are in there. Their pair against yours is the only benchmark with any local meaning. A Calgary number compared to a national average tells you nothing you can act on.

Then decide whether a paid seat answers a question you genuinely have. Plenty of Calgary businesses find the free pass sufficient, because the finding was obvious.

Backlink Work for Calgary Businesses

SEO Company To-The-TOP! has worked White Hat only since 2007. Nineteen years now. One specialist stays on the account, so no junior sits between the audit and the reporting.

Majestic exports do get used in To-The-TOP! audits. A CSV of referring domains is where a disavow decision starts. The Trust Flow column becomes one input among several.

A proper website audit reads that profile before anybody proposes link building. Sometimes the pass turns up leftovers from a previous provider.

No position guarantees. Three to six months before meaningful movement, longer in a competitive market. Real search engine optimization earns links slowly.

Some businesses want traffic while the organic side gets sorted out. Running Google Ads management alongside covers that stretch, on a different timeline.

Any Calgary SEO pitch quoting a Trust Flow target per month is quoting the wrong thing. Monthly reporting from To-The-TOP! covers positions instead. That is what buying SEO services from a person gets you rather than a dashboard seat.

Common Questions About Majestic SEO

Is Majestic SEO free?

Partly, though the exact allowance changes. Top-line Trust Flow and Citation Flow have long been visible on a domain lookup without payment. Full backlink lists and the export tools sit behind a subscription. Confirm the current plan page before budgeting either way.

What is a good Trust Flow score?

Depends entirely on the market. Above twenty reads as respectable for most local business sites. The comparison that matters is against Citation Flow rather than against a benchmark.

Does Google use Trust Flow or Citation Flow?

No. Both are Majestic’s own metrics, calculated from Majestic’s own crawl. Google has never published anything equivalent.

Is Majestic better than Ahrefs for backlinks?

Different strengths. Majestic’s historic index reaches further back, which helps on old domains. Ahrefs tends to refresh faster on new links. Practitioners who care about link data often keep both.

Why did my Trust Flow drop with no lost links?

Usually the index moved rather than your site. A recrawl can change the seed distances. The Fresh Index also ages out links that the Historic Index still holds.

Somebody will send you a Trust Flow number this month with no Citation Flow beside it. Worth asking which index it came out of before you price anything off that.