The ‘Perfect’ Website in Majestic

There are a lot of ‘How To’ articles on the internet about SEO Tools. I should know, I’ve written a few myself 🙂

There are even a lot of posts written about the particular SEO tool I’ll be discussing today; Majestic.com.

However, the content always seems to surround the same generic advice on the software’s functionality, and what you can use it for which always strikes me as being one step away from what we really want as SEO practitioners…

…knowing what a great, natural authority website look like in Majestic SEO and, if our website falls short, how we get it looking like that.

This is my motivation for this post – to show you what an exceptionally healthy and powerful, natural authority website (in SEO terms of course) looks like in Majestic, and how we can get our website looking like that if it’s not already.

How Majestic Works

Let’s get the generic stuff out the way so we can move on to something more actionable.

Majestic is one of the most powerful link analysis software on the internet. I absolutely love it. Put me on a desert island, give me a laptop and a basic subscription to Majestic, and I’ll be the richest (and probably only) SEO consultant on that island within a few short months!

It works in a similar way to Google. It has robots that follow links around the internet from website to website. It then builds a huge database as to where the links are going to and from, mapping out the link profiles of every website.

Why Is That Good For Us?

If the software is mimicking how Google works, then we have the chance to objectively analyse the link profiles of any website, including our own. We can get an understanding of how Google is viewing a website in terms of its off-page optimisation. This gives us insight into what we must do as SEOs for that website to improve its optimisation, and ultimately, its rankings.

Remember,

Better Optimisation > Better Rankings > Better Traffic > Better Profits > Better Life.

The Perfect Site

Now we know the basics of Majestic, let’s look at the ‘perfect’ website in Majestic.

Before I get slammed in the comments section, I’m well aware there is no ‘perfect’ site in terms of anything, let alone SEO. However, the post title “A Good Quality Website In Majestic” just didn’t have the same ring to it 🙂

What I really want to show you here is  what a natural, powerful website’s off-page optimisation usually looks like in the Majestic tool.

With that little disclaimer out the way, let’s get stuck into it.

Majestic’s Summary Page

More often than not, all we need from the tool is what is presented to us on the ‘Summary’ page, which is why I like it so much. We don’t need an intimate knowledge of the various tabs, pages and dark corners on the tool. The summary page is suffice to get a quick and accurate understanding of the quality of a website’s optimisation.

So let’s run through the metrics on the Summary page…

Trust Flow & Citation Flow

What are they?

Trust Flow (TF) is a score the software gives to a website based on the trust signals coming from inbound links to that website.

Citation Flow (CF) is a score the software gives to a website based on the ‘link equity’/power from the inbound links to that website.

From analysing thousands upon thousands of sites in Majestic, I’ve created a little table to show what different scores mean in terms of how Google views the trustworthiness and strength of any given page’s off page optimisation.

The relationship between TF and CF

Trust flow is the most important metric in Majestic because trust is everything for Google.

If you have a website with a high trust flow but a much lower citation flow, that’s fine.

If you have a website with a high citation flow but a much lower trust flow, you should start to smell a rat. What kind of websites have powerful but untrustworthy links coming into them? Spam websites, link farms, Russian porn sites (so I’m told!), poor quality directories.

The ‘Perfect’ Site’s Trust and Citation Flow?

We want to see as high a trust flow as possible, and a citation flow that is also as high. However, the citation flow should ideally be lower than the trust flow and certainly not more than double that of the trust flow.

TF = 27 & CF = 25… that’s looking pretty good.

TF = 27 & CF = 55… that’s looking like your site is involved in something sketchy and is on track for some Google-inflicted pain!

Topical Trust Flow

What is it?

Page relevance. I talk about this so often that sometimes I worry that I’m boring people. But it’s so important in Google!

Topical Trust Flow gives us an insight into how strong our website’s off-page optimisation is in terms of relevance to the industry our target keywords are in. It shows us the main topics the software thinks our website is about based on the websites linking to us.

If we’re trying to convince Google that we’re a great website in the construction industry, and our primary topical trust flow (the first one in the list) is ‘Arts/Comics’, it’s time we tried to attract links from more relevant websites to our own.

The ‘Perfect’ Site’s Topical Trust Flow?

No prizes for guessing this. The perfect site’s primary topical trust flow will be the most relevant topic to the niche the website is operating in. The secondary topical trust flows (any other topics showing besides the top one on the list) will also be in relevant topics.

External Backlinks & Referring Domains

What are they?

These 2 metrics refer to the number of individual links coming into a site and the number of separate domains linking to our site. For example, if you had no other links coming to your website apart from 5 links on 5 different pages on one domain, then you would have 5 external backlinks and 1 referring domain.

The ‘Perfect’ Site’s External Backlinks & Referring Domains

As long as the links coming to your site are trustworthy, the more referring domains the better. It’s natural to have more external backlinks than referring domains. Let’s say you had a link placed on the sidebar of a website. This link would be replicated on every single page on their website, so you would have numerous external backlinks but only one referring domain.

That said, a massive number of external links and only a handful of referring domains can be a cause for concern and you need to check that there isn’t huge amount of spammy links coming to the site. You can further investigate using the ‘Links’ tab.

Governmental & Educational Referral Domains

What are they?

This shows us if any of the inbound links coming to the site are .gov or .edu links. These are top-level domain extensions associated with high-trust governmental and educational organisations (e.g yale.edu or energy.gov).

The ‘Perfect’ Site’s Governmental & Educational Domains

Links from these types of domains are synonymous with high-quality, authority websites. A perfect site would certainly see at least a few of these trustworthy links in their link profile.

Backlink Breakdown

What is it?

Majestic allows us to see the type of links coming to our site in graphical form.

These, in order of most common are:

Text Links – this is the most common link type, and is a hyperlink on wording

Images – a link associated with an image

Redirects – any URL that is redirecting to the site

Frames – if the link coming to the site was found in a <FRAME> tag

We then have secondary graphs showing us the proportion of links that are ‘NoFollow’ and ‘Follow’, and the number of links that are still live compared the number that have been deleted.

The ‘Perfect’ Site’s Backlink Breakdown

Usually, the majority of links coming to a site will be text links (normally 70-90%) with the rest being image links. Only a very small proportion of links should be coming from redirects or frames.

We’d expect a ‘normal’ site to have a the bulk of links being ‘Follow’ links with a smaller section coming from ‘NoFollow’ links.

The less deleted links the better.

Anchor Text

What is it?

Majestic will show us all the anchor text associated with the text links (or image ‘alt’ tags) coming to our site. The Anchor Text is the clickable text that takes you to another site/URL.

This is a huge deal for off-page optimisation as Google will scrutinise over anchor text and anchor text ratio to:

1. assess the relevance of your site to your target keywords
2. police against over optimisation.

The ‘Perfect’ Site’s Anchor Text

A trustworthy authority site will have a large number of natural and powerful links coming into it. The vast majority of these links’ anchor text will be branded or non-keyword.

Therefore, any sections on the pie graph (which depict the site’s anchor text ratio) other than the section for ‘Other Anchor Text’ will likely refer to branded anchors or common miscellaneous terms e.g Thomas Cook, thomas cook, website, visit website, thomascook.com, www.thomascook.com etc.

If you see large sections of the pie chart with commercial keywords then it’s likely unnatural. It could be just a matter of time before you get hit by the Penguin penalty!

Diagnose & Fix For Higher Rankings.

Now you know what a powerfully optimised website should look like on Majestic’s summary page, go and inspect your own site on majestic.com to see how you’re holding up.

If your site’s trust and citation flow are low, find websites to link to yours that have high trust and citation flow with primary topical trust flow related to yours niche.

If you have large sections of the anchor text pie chart dedicated to your primary keyword, you need to get more branded links going to your site that’ll dilute your anchor text ratio.

Majestic is the best software for getting a quick grasp of the condition of a site’s off page optimisation. If the summary page throws up some red flags, you can use the dedicated topic tabs to explore the issue in more depth.