How is Citation Flow calculated, and what are the key factors that contribute to it?

Citation Flow is a metric calculated by the backlink analysis tool Majestic that attempts to measure a website's influence or importance based on its backlink profile.

The key factors that go into determining a site's Citation Flow score include:

• The total number of unique backlinks or referring domains pointing to the site. In general, more unique linking sources can contribute to a higher Citation Flow score.

• How topically relevant those linking pages and sites are to your website's content and niche? Links from websites in similar or related topic spaces are prioritized.

• The overall authority, trustworthiness, domain age, and backlink profile strength of the linking websites themselves. More authoritative, trustworthy sites make their links more valuable.

• Potentially some link attributes like whether it's a follow or nofollow link, the anchor text used, and the HTML element the link is coded in.

• Even the proximity or position of the link on the linking page's content may play some role in the scoring.

Now Majestic doesn't disclose the full proprietary algorithm for exactly how Citation Flow is calculated using these factors. But the main idea is quantifying the overall influence and importance of your site's backlink profile.

That's why Citation Flow is usually analyzed alongside Majestic's other key metric Trust Flow, which evaluates more of the trustworthiness and quality scoring of your backlinks.

While it provides valuable backlink data insights, Citation Flow is really meant to be one tool in the toolbox when analyzing and building a strong backlink portfolio. The overall focus should still be on earning high-quality, relevant, and authoritative backlinks through ethical practices.