Majestic

Citation Flow is a trademark of Majestic. Citation Flow is a score between 0-100 which helps to measure the link equity or "power" the website or link carries. Citation flow is used in conjunction with "Trust Flow". Together the Citation Flow and Trust Flow form the Majestic Flow Metric algorithm.

Citation Flow represents an evolutionary leap from our old metric - ACRank - and predicts how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. Links are now not all created with equal weight - and because a strong link will have a relatively stronger influence on URLs, Citation Flow is based on stronger, iterative mathematical logic than the old metric of ACRank.

"Flow Metric" is a registered trademark of Majestic. Flow Metric scores are unique measures determined and created by Majestic. The scores flow through the entire web and use a logarithmic scale. Flow Metric scores are expressed as numbers between 0 and 100, the higher the number, the stronger the signal. They measure both Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

Find out more about Flow Metric scores by watching our How to Video.

When looking at the immediate area around a backlink, it is not unusual to see that the link is surrounded by other links. This would typically be seen in a header, footer, navigation, blogroll, or on a category hub page. Link Density is a measure of the percentage of surrounding content that is made up of other links. A high Link Density suggests that the link is indeed in the middle of a group of links, whereas a low Link Density implies that the link is surrounded by non-link content, for example, a single link inside a paragraph of text.

The Anchor Text is the clickable text that takes you to another site/URL; forming a hyperlink. For images, anchor text is often defined as the "AltText" of the link. Search engines may use this text to help determine the subject matter of the linked-to information.

A backlink is an incoming link from a different website or referring domain. Within the SEO industry a "backlink" can sometimes be referred to as an "inbound link".

Learn all about links and backlinks in our beginners guide: What is a Backlink?

In SEO terms, a "Class C subnet" refers to a class-c sized network, where the last octet; (number separated by dots), of the IPV4 address is ignored. So if there are three machines, one with IP 1.2.3.4, one with IP 1.2.3.5, and one with IP 1.2.4.1, an SEO expert may say that the machines are hosted on two Class-C subnets.

These terms have subtly different definitions in technical systems networking than in SEO, which can lead to confusion.

Sum of all links pointing to target. Not limited to one link per referring URL

External Referring URLs is the number of URLs in this index that point to this item. Long-term Majestic users may know this as the classic External Backlinks number.

This is the date that the link was first located and indexed within the Fresh or Historic Indexes.

Please Note: There is a slight memory effect on some links, particularly within the Fresh Index. A "<" symbol before a date suggests that it is likely the link went live some time before the date shown. Older links in the Fresh Index will also appear in the Historic Index.

Link Context significantly reduces the need for individual backlink inspection, providing detailed information on the location and text around a link. Link Context can give an indication on where in a page a link may be, how many other links are close to it, and how many other links are on the source page. Statistics and scores are calculated from the Link Context analysis, powering a range of filtering and sorting options to help you quickly evaluate the quality of links.

Link Context is so rich, we launched it with a downloadable, free Link Context guide.

The name of our crawler, responsible for discovering and collecting the data required to build the backlink index.

For more detail on our crawler, how it identifies itself and how it interacts with robots.txt, see the MJ12Bot site.

NoFollow is an often misunderstood link attribute. Historically it was thought to prevent the page rank algorithm passing value to NoFollow links. DoFollow links (those without the NoFollow attribute) are thought to have greater value in SEO than NoFollow links.

This is an abbreviation for "Referring C-subnets".

In the Majestic system, multiple counts calculated links, de-duplicating links across pages; (which we refer to as backlink count), across domains; (the domain count), and across c-subnets. The C-subnet count is useful, as it is possible for the same class C-subnet to be used by one, or associated organisations. For larger sites, counting the unique linking relationships across C-subnets can also be useful.

Source flags are designed to differentiate between different types of links. The following source flags are currently in use:

"Top Backlinks" are an attempt to list the most popular backlinks linking into the website you are analysing. Using Flow Metric, we can determine the importance of sites and pages.

Please note: Majestic reserve the right to enhance the metrics used to calculate page importance at any time.

Toxic backlinks is SEO industry slang for what Google describes as Unnatural Links designed to manipulate search results. Toxic links violate Google Webmaster Guidelines and could be considered the "Bad PR" of the digital marketing world. Unnatural, low quality links are considered toxic because they are unlikely to boost your position in search, and could even result in a manual penalty that makes it near impossible to find your site in search results.

Learn more about toxic links and how you can identify them in our guide to toxic backlinks.

API stands for an Application Programming Interface. This is an interface, which allows access to Majestic data for application development and automated queries. Majestic has three classes of API.

1. Our OpenApps API is available with a Platinum subscription. OpenApps will let you create third party applications that any user with a Majestic account can then link to and access. Developers using OpenApps are responsible for providing support for their applications.
2. For agencies with an internal dashboard or similar bespoke in-house requirement, we offer a range of API enabled plans for internal use only. These plans offer significant quantities of resources far in excess of the web based plans. With considered implementation, significant per-seat costs can be avoided while reducing the scope for vendor lock-in on what can be a critical supply of backlink data for your agencies ongoing data analysis.
3. Our Premium Partner API facilitates the building of web and public facing applications. Reseller API deals are individually negotiated, and typically cost several thousands of pounds a month. Should you be interested in the Reseller API, please email sales@majestic.com.

The Bulk Backlink Checker allows you to analyse the backlink numbers for up to 400 URLs using the paste URLs feature, and up to 1,000,000 URLs from a file upload (depending on your remaining Analysis Units).

Bulk Backlink Checker is designed to very quickly check backlink and referring domain counts for the top 10 billion most-linked to URLs in our database, all subdomains and root domains present in our database. Bulk Backlink Checker has high-level counts for each URL and comes with Topical Trust Flow as standard.

Campaigns give you an opportunity to group websites that are important to you, and check back for updates on their progress. Every time the Fresh Index updates, so will the campaign, allowing you to watch the evolution of key metrics for the items in your campaign. Summary graphs in each campaign will draw your eye to any domains or URL that have referring domain, External Referring URL, Trust Flow or Citation Flow movement.

The Context tab contains Link Intelligence data expressed in a more usable way. Displaying Link Context data, you have all the backlink profile you need, together with new data points to improve your organic search and digital marketing efforts.

Context Provides:

• An analysis of the Source Page.
• A summary of the number of outbound links, both in the document and in the proximity of the backlink.
• A "Link Density" chart indicates where the outbound link was located in the source page.

Link Context is so rich, we launched it with a downloadable, free Link Context guide.

Link Density Charts attempt to capture the essence of a link in the context of the source page. Source code analysis is used to produce a comparable chart, showing where on the page each link is, and how many links are close to it. Both internal and external links are visualised, giving an at-a-glance comparison of the source code. Link Density Charts are a data visualisation associated with Link Context.

Analysis Options are a set of filtering options found within the Advanced Reports. When an Advanced Report is created, there are some filters in place automatically. You can edit/add filters by selecting "Analysis Options" at the top of an open report. There are 4 tabs of filters: Target, Source, Anchor Text and Flow Metric.

For more information on the Analysis Options and how to use them, check out our "Power User Tips: Advanced Report Filtering" blog post.

ACRank is a very simple measure of how important a particular page is by assigning an integer value from 0 (lowest) to 15 (highest) depending on number of unique referring external root domains.

ACRank has now been replaced with Citation Flow, providing a more sophisticated measure of link quantity.

ACRank spread shows number of ACRanked backlinks split by their ACRank.

ACRank Spread has now been replaced with Link Profile, providing a more sophisticated measure of link quantity against link quality.