This normally wouldn’t be a topic I would blog about but I’ve seen multiple people mention it, so why not get in on the action? This won’t be a long blog post, just a short one breaking down topical trust flow, what it is, and if it matters.
What Is Topical Trust Flow?
First off, if you don’t know what it is, that’s okay. It doesn’t make you any better at SEO, in fact, it isn’t even a Google metric.
Topical Trust Flow is a metric created by Majestic SEO. It’s a company that offers SEO tools, more specifically along the lines of analysis and backlink analysis.
Topical Trust Flow is their own created metric to categorize pages, domains, sub domains based on the topic or proximity to the overall topic.
Why Would Topical Trust Flow Matter?
For most people, it wouldn’t matter. However, if you’re looking to build some backlinks or find opportunities to connect with influencers, it could be a decent tool.
Obviously if you’re doing any kind of backlink building, you want to build backlinks that matter. You want backlinks that have a chance at getting traffic or exposure, and if you’re wanting some traffic you want the traffic to be relevant and high quality, right? You don’t want traffic from a site about cramps and periods if you have a men’s fitness site… and you don’t want traffic from a weight loss site if you’re offering web design and SEO services.
Topical Trust Flow helps you identify opportunities related to your topic. It can be useful.
So Does Topical Trust Flow Make A Difference With Rankings?
Of course not. This is nothing more than a feature that a company added, branded, and uses to sell more subscriptions.
There’s nothing wrong with it, their job is to sell things that could be helpful but it is other marketers and SEO guys that seem to have a sketchy idea about what it does or if it really makes an impact.
Using the metric, it can assist you in marketing and link building, sure… but topical trust flow… within your own website, doesn’t really make much of a difference.
You must keep in mind that this is NOT a Google Used Metric!
Google doesn’t care what Majestic does, they don’t care what citation flow, trust flow, or topical trust flow is… Google has their own metrics.
I saw a screen shot of a guy that is a self proclaimed SEO expert and offers “coaching” at $2,000/mo…going on about how he finally figured out how to manipulate topical trust flow. Whoopdy freaking do.
Manipulating it for what? It doesn’t matter if you manipulate it… it’s ONLY used by Majestic, not Google.
Summary
In the world of SEO there’s a lot of snake oil. There’s a lot of new topics, buzzwords, and trends that people follow blindly. A lot of it can be filtered out by the use of basic logic.
This was at no fault to Majestic, they do what they’re supposed to, but it’s the SEOs and marketers that have mistaken its’ purpose and turned it into something it really isn’t.
Be careful what you place importance on!
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about this at all, but it does make a lot of sense.
Thanks for the info!!!
I see idiots all the time talking about topical trust flow. Anyone that actually does SEO for a living knows this is a bullshit metric.
Good post Nathan. I actually use the Majestic suite for analysis purposes and agree with everything you said here.
I’m in a Facebook group that talks about this a lot and I just have to shake my head at times.
Do you honestly think Google isn’t categorizing pages as well? Majestic may be a 3rd party method but it’s pretty darn accurate and I imagine it is c1omparable to how Google is doing it. To take a shot at sculpting relevamcy, the SEO implications are a lot bigger than what you’ve written in this post.
Andrew, I don’t mean any disrespect, I appreciate the comment here but what you said is pretty silly. Majestic is a 3rd party method but pretty accurate and that you imagine it is comparable to what Google is doing. How would we ever know if it was accurate and if what you imagine is true, how could we quantify it? We couldn’t.
Also based on Google patents and how their algorithm works and comparing that to the topic trust flow metric you can easily see how this metric exists simply as a benefit to Majestic. Topical trust flow DOES provide some benefits, like finding the most relevant pages for trying to get some backlinks, but other than that it’s pretty useless. Saying it’s comparable to Google couldn’t be further from the truth, sculpting relevance is an entirely different concept.
That’s just the nature of SEO – much of it is a guessing game. We know that Google categorizes pages and we know that Majestic also does. Since we do not have access to Google’s API to scrape their categorization of pages, we have the next best thing.
“Topical trust flow DOES provide some benefits, like finding the most relevant pages for trying to get some backlinks, but other than that it’s pretty useless.”
I couldn’t figure out any other use for it.
When was the last time you were able to take a list of 10,000 backlinks and get an idea within a few minutes of which ones were relevant to your site or not
Did you read the post? He said it was useful for backlinking.
As someone that has 250ish clients for SEO both organic and local I can tell you that majestic is mediocre at best and a tool for the kiddies.
Sounds like you’re just trying to justify your purchase but sooner or later you’ll see it for what it really is.
Ha… and I thought I was coming across as the anti-majestic one. I agree though, and I feel the same about a LOT of tools out there, not just theirs.
Yes, in the article I did say it was useful for backlinking. However, if you’re building links the right way, you shouldn’t need a tool to tell you if the link would be relevant or not, lol. I think a lot of people are still hung up on link volume. Generally I can outrank a site with literally just a few links and co-occurrence/co-citation strategy.
I disagree. I don’t think Majestic is that useful, and I think topical trust flow exists only for the people using their stuff. When google is determining the relevance of a page, it has nothing to do with what Majestic determines is the “topical trust flow” and the people that talk about manipulating it are just stupid. It makes no difference if you can manipulate it or not.
To answer your question, I never needed to take a list of 10k backlinks and see which ones are relevant. Backlinking is really a primitive SEO strategy, much better off approaching it like you would when marketing your business. Get backlinks that get traffic, I don’t care about anything else.
In my experience Google ‘ s categorizing pages has nothing to do with topical trust flow. Trustrank itself is more of an issue than topical trust flow will ever be.
How they categorize is based on what you just mentioned, Co occurrence cocitations LSI both on page and off site.
If you need ttf to determine whether you should try to get a back link then you shouldn’t call yourself an SEO.
Andrew is right though, about a lot of SEO being guess work and the nature of the industry is a lot of speculation. I try to remove as much speculation as I can based on real data but the data we have at our disposal isn’t even measurable in comparison to the Big G.
Bully, With more and more places accepting TF. What do you think these days?
I still believe it’s a made up metric, because it is. Now, that being said, just because I don’t use it as part of my strategy, doesn’t mean you or others can’t. I’m a simple man that likes keeping things simple. lol.