[This is a transcription from the Clickx Marketing Hack of the Day video series.]
Hey, I am Solomon with Clickx. For today’s Marketing Hack of the Day, we are going to talk about how to judge the quality of the backlinks that you are getting.
Deciphering Trust Flow & Citation Flow
So, lot of people send me emails and say, “I do not know what the trust flow is or what the citation flow is! Help me understand, I need learn laymans terms, I do not understand.”
Citation flow goes from zero to one hundred, zero is very poor and one hundred is really good. Now, only Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, and all those guys are the only ones that have one hundred or up there! Pretty up there! Everybody else is going to be below. You might be at 10, you might be at 20, might be at 30, or you might be at 40, 50, 60, but you are not going to be a hundred, just so you know. It merely a popularity contest. How many links do you have coming to your website, total number of links coming to your website; that is the only thing a citation flow is looking for!
Now, the trust flow, the one that I like, is the one that kind of goes over the quality of the site. The quality? What do I mean by quality? It means it is trusted? It is a trusted site that is linking to it. It is not going to be somebody’s small little blog or a forum or a blog commenting slow scheme that you have done, it is going to be the much higher quality website. It is coming from a trusted website; a trusted website by Google, a trusted by the link that it gets to it.
So, what you have to take from here is, where is your citation flow compared to your trust flow? Think about that! Take a look at it! Run the Clickx Grader, put your domain name through it, and look at that! If you are using the Clickx app, in the backlink section of your website, in the backlink section of your competitors websites; we will go over in-depth, citation flow and trust flow.
Try To Improve The Quality vs. Quantity Ratio
And I know, it is the topic that you do not really understand, because you do not look at it every day. But I want to train your mind think about it in different sense. Train your mind in terms of quantity and quality. Of course to me, I am worried about the quantity, but I am really more worried about the quality!
In fact, you want to work on getting your citation flow and your trust flow to be in similar numbers. So these two metrics can work together to help you understand what portion of your site is a trusted link versus untrusted link versus just quantity, right? The trust and the just mere quantity.
That is what you need to think about, think about that when you look at your site, to your competitors! What is their citation flow to trust flow? Is it really high citation and really low trust flow? If it is then they got themselves some sort of backlinks scheme that they paid five dollars for or five hundred dollars for a thousand links that are not good. In fact, that is going to put them under Google’s penalty, sooner than later; just because they might have got some links from bad neighborhood. They might have gotten some links that are created by some automation, or somebody who is getting five dollars and creating really crappy links that are not good.
Examine Your Current Backlinks
Work on looking at the backlinks that you currently have. Take a look at all those links and say, “Hey man, do I like these links?” and look at your competitors. The way that we sort the links in our app in Clickx is actually organized with the highest citation flow and to the lowest.
So the first 500 links that you go through of yours, or your competitors, are going to be sorted in order so you do not have to go figure this out per site! It is already there, download the CSV file; look at that and work backwards!
It is so easy if you can think about, “I want to get high quality links to my websites, how do I do it?” Go to competitors, click on the domain name of your competitors, and view the backlinks; that is what you have to do! And then download it. Work offline! Make it a task for yourself to recharge to every single one of them! Find out if you have to make phone calls, email them, do whatever it takes; then you are going to get those high quality links to your website and then you see that your organic store pick the momentum!
Avoid Having Low Quality Links To Avoid Penalties
You might have heard Google penalizing sites because of bad links. You might heard of all the different algorithm updates Google is making to punish those people that are coming and creating automated links. Low quality links that are a whole thing that Google is working on; trying to get the good ones right from the bad.
So, if citation flow of your website is so much higher than your trust flow, then you might be trading that you should be working on! You might be having a Google penalty or you are competitive for that matter for having a natural links or spammy links; anything like that is going to be one your citation flow so much better than your trust flow.
If you have a website that is in this mode, very high citation flow to trust flow, then you might want to abandon your domain name and start over the new site. It is very hard to do it or you want to work on a clean-up project, go right ahead! It is going to take you a long time to get rid of those links ask them, contact and prove to Google that you have actually done that so that Google can actually help you, right this allows those links. It can help you do that, but it is going to be a long game.
If You Produce Trustworthy Links, You’ll Be In Great Shape
You are going to have to really work hard or work really hard getting those trustworthy links, so that you can be on the good shapes! You have to think about both, they work hand-in-hand so there is another very popular, metric called domain authority. And the problem with the domain authority is that it goes into just one number, right? Domain authority is 20, 30, and 40 whatever it is it just goes to one number that is the representation of these links at the domain level. It is “www.mysite.com,” not specific to a particular page in which the link is coming from. The problem with just working on domain authority at the higher level, is that links that you get are not really coming from that home page! That is what it is really measuring is the quality of the home page. But your link is in five directories deep, it is may be like, “the domains, blogs, this, that,” and you do not have such high domain authority at that page.
Break It Down Page By Page
You have to really look at the quality of the page and the authority of the page in which your link is coming from. And the reason why we break it down on a per page basis is that we want to get the quality on that particular page in which your website is. The page in which your competitor is listed. The page in which your current backlinks are listed or where you are trying to go get your backlinks from!
That is the goal, right?
You really want to work on that level. That is what it is going to help you get more traffic and not just giving you a metric like domain authority which literarily means nothing! Nothing, because you are not getting a link from the home page means nothing to you. It is a great metric for that person, it is their website, and they got a great metric; you do not. So that is not really going to help you in SEOs.
You want to think about that. I know it is a lot of information, but I hope you guys had some insights as to how you are going to measure the quality of your backlinks and work on getting more links for you that is high quality, the stuff that you can get was a tool, the stuff that you can just get by turning on a tool and automatically getting it. That is what you really want to work on.
I hope you guys had some insights into this topic, thanks for watching another edition of Marketing Hack of the Day.
