In short
Majestic is a backlink intelligence platform that crawls links and provides its own link indexes and metrics; its scores are not Google ranking factors.
What is Majestic
Majestic is a backlink analysis tool launched in 2004. It maintains its own crawl-based backlink index. Its main feature is metrics based on flow rather than a formula‑driven domain authority.
Majestic metrics
- Trust Flow (TF) — quality of backlinks. It flows from trusted, moderated sites (universities, governments, major news outlets). Higher TF means more reliable links.
- Citation Flow (CF) — volume of backlinks. CF alone doesn’t indicate quality, but paired with TF it shows how ‘natural’ the profile is.
- Do not use a fixed CF/TF ratio as a quality rule; review the referring page, target relevance and link placement.
Topical Trust Flow
An extension of Trust Flow: it shows in which topic category the link trust resides. For example, a finance site with high Topical Trust Flow in the Finance category is a provider classification that may help prioritize manual relevance review. Majestic distinguishes over 800 topic categories.
To evaluate a donor, look at Trust Flow together with Topical Trust Flow in your niche. TF < 10 is generally low quality, 20+ is good, 40+ is excellent (for moderately sized sites).
FAQ
No. They are provider metrics, not search-engine scores. Use them to prioritize review, then inspect the referring page, topical context and link placement.
The free version has limited reports and doesn’t show all data. For serious SEO analysis, a subscription (Lite / Pro) is required.
Fresh link indexing happens every few days, but a full crawl of large sites can take weeks. For checking a just‑placed link, use GSC instead of Majestic.