Topical Trust Flow
Topical Trust Flow is a Majestic metric that breaks Trust Flow down by subject, showing which topics a site is trusted for. It helps you judge a linking site’s relevance to your niche.
Function of Topical Trust Flow
Majestic is a backlink tool with its own index of the web. Its two best-known metrics are Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Citation Flow estimates how much link strength a site has, based on the volume of links pointing to it. Trust Flow estimates link quality, based on how closely a site is linked to a set of trusted seed sites that Majestic has reviewed by hand.
Topical Trust Flow adds a subject dimension to that trust. Majestic sorts websites into a large taxonomy of topic categories, such as Business, Health, Sports, Computers, Recreation and News, each with many subcategories. Its seed sites are classified by topic too. As trust flows from those seeds through links across the web, Majestic tracks which topics that trust comes from.
The result is a breakdown of a site’s trust by subject. A cooking blog might show high Topical Trust Flow in “Recreation/Food” and lower scores in unrelated categories. A web design agency might score highest in “Computers/Internet/Web Design.” Each topic gets its own score from 0 to 100, and the highest-scoring topic is usually shown as the site’s main topic.
This tells you something a single number cannot. Two sites with Trust Flow 40 might look identical on the surface. Topical Trust Flow can show that one is trusted for finance topics and the other for gaming. If you run a finance site, only one of those is a relevant link source.
Topical Trust Flow is available for domains, subdomains and individual URLs in Majestic’s Site Explorer, usually shown as a list of topics with colored labels and their scores.
Use in Link Prospecting
Topical Trust Flow is most useful when you are choosing which sites to approach for links.
Checking relevance is the main use. Before pitching a guest post or link insertion, look at the prospect’s top topics. If they match your niche, the site is likely to be a relevant link source. If its trust comes mainly from unrelated topics, a link from it says less about your subject. Lists of guest posting sites become far more useful when filtered this way.
Spotting suspicious sites is another. A site that claims to cover technology but shows its highest Topical Trust Flow in gambling or adult categories may have a history of selling links or a past owner in a different niche. That mismatch is worth checking before you agree to a placement.
Comparing competitors helps too. Looking at the Topical Trust Flow of sites linking to your competitors shows which topics their links come from. If top-ranking sites in your niche have strong links from a particular topic category, that points you toward prospects worth pursuing.
Measuring your own profile shows whether your site is building trust in the right subjects. If your site’s top topic matches your niche, your links are coming from relevant places. If it shows trust from unrelated categories, your profile may need more relevant links to build topical authority in SEO.
Many link builders set simple filters, such as “top topic must match our niche” or “relevant topic score above a set level,” to sort large prospect lists quickly before manual review.
Limitations of Topical Trust Flow
Topical Trust Flow is useful, but it has limits.
Google does not use it. It is a Majestic estimate, not a measure of how Google sees a site’s relevance. Google uses its own systems to understand topics and links.
Categories can be broad or odd. Majestic’s taxonomy is large, but sites do not always fit neatly. A site covering marketing for restaurants may be classified under food, business or marketing depending on its links, which can be confusing.
It reflects links, not content. Topical Trust Flow comes from the topics of linking sites, not from what a site publishes. A site can write about one subject while drawing most of its links from another.
It depends on Majestic’s index. If Majestic has not crawled a site’s links fully, its topical scores may be incomplete.
Small sites can show thin data. New or niche sites with few links may show low scores across all topics, which makes comparisons harder.
Scores can be influenced. Sites that buy links from relevant categories can inflate their topical scores, the same way other metrics can be gamed.
It does not measure traffic or quality. A site can have strong topical trust and still have no readers or poor content.
Use Topical Trust Flow as a relevance signal alongside a manual review of the site’s content, traffic and outbound links.
Comparison with Other Metrics
Topical Trust Flow fits into a wider set of link metrics.
Trust Flow measures overall link quality without a topic breakdown. Topical Trust Flow splits that same trust into subjects.
Citation Flow measures link volume and influence regardless of quality. Comparing Trust Flow with Citation Flow shows whether a site’s links are high quality or mostly quantity. A site with high Citation Flow and low Trust Flow often has many low-quality links.
Ahrefs Domain Rating and Moz Domain Authority measure overall domain strength. Neither offers a topic breakdown like Majestic’s, though both tools offer other ways to assess relevance, such as looking at the keywords a site ranks for.
Semrush Authority Score combines link power, organic traffic and spam signals into one domain score, again without topical categories.
Organic keyword data, available in Ahrefs and Semrush, offers another view of relevance. The topics a site ranks for show what search engines think it is about, which complements the link-based view from Topical Trust Flow.
The strongest prospect checks combine several of these: Topical Trust Flow for link-based relevance, ranking keywords for content-based relevance, traffic for real audience and a manual look at the site itself.
Topical Trust Flow shows which subjects a site is trusted for, based on the links pointing to it. Use it to filter link prospects by relevance, spot mismatched sites and check your own profile, and pair it with traffic, content and manual review before deciding.