Trust Flow (TF) is a metric created by Majestic, scored from 0 to 100, that measures the quality of a domain's backlink profile. It looks at how trustworthy the sites linking to a domain are. A domain linked by government websites and universities will have a much higher TF than one linked by random blog comments and forum spam.
How Trust Flow is calculated
Majestic starts with a manually curated seed set of trusted websites. These are sites that are unquestionably legitimate, like major news publications and government portals. Trust Flow then spreads outward through links. If a trusted seed site links to site A, site A gets some trust. If site A links to site B, site B inherits a smaller amount. The more hops from the seed set, the less trust flows through.
This is different from just counting links. A domain could have 10,000 backlinks but a TF of 5 because they're all from low-quality directories. Another domain might have 50 backlinks but a TF of 40 because those links come from authoritative sources.
The TF/CF ratio is what experienced buyers look at. Trust Flow divided by Citation Flow gives you a quality ratio. A ratio above 0.5 (or 50%) generally points to a clean link profile. Below 0.3 is a red flag, meaning the domain has lots of links but few of them are trustworthy.
Why it matters for expired domains
Trust Flow is one of the first things to check on an expired domain before buying it. A domain with TF 30+ and a healthy TF/CF ratio is likely a legitimate site that built real authority over time. But a domain with TF 2 and CF 40 was probably a spam project.
On CatchDoms, every domain shows its TF, CF, and TF/CF ratio in dedicated columns. You can filter by minimum TF using the tf_min filter to only see domains above your quality threshold. The Topical Trust Flow category column also tells you what niche the backlinks come from.