Reading backlink metrics without fooling yourself

Every link marketplace shows you a wall of three-letter metrics next to each site. TF, CF, DA, DR, RD, PA. They come from different vendors, measure different things, and are gamed to different degrees.

If you buy on the highest number you see, you will overpay for links that do nothing. Here is what each metric actually tells you.

What each metric measures

They are all logarithmic. Going from DR 20 to DR 30 is easy; DR 60 to DR 70 is a different universe. Never treat these as linear.

The two that are hardest to fake

Of everything on that list, organic traffic and referring domains are the metrics that resist manipulation best.

Traffic is hard to fake because it is estimated from actual ranking positions on real keywords. A site with 8,000 estimated monthly visits ranks for thousands of queries. You cannot buy that in a weekend.

Referring domains from distinct sites is similarly stubborn. You can inflate it, but doing so is expensive and leaves an obvious profile.

TF, DA and DR are all derived from backlink graphs, which means they can be inflated by pointing links at a domain. A site with DR 45 and 200 monthly visitors has been worked on. A site with DR 45 and 15,000 monthly visitors is a real site.

The single most useful check is the ratio between authority and traffic. High authority with near-zero traffic is the classic signature of a domain built purely to sell links, and links from those domains are quietly devalued rather than penalised, which means you pay for nothing and never find out.

The Trust Flow / Citation Flow ratio

Majestic's two scores are most useful when read together.

• TF close to CF (ratio above 0.5) means a balanced profile, where the links pointing in are decent quality
• TF far below CF (ratio under 0.3) means lots of links and little trust, usually a site that bought its way up

A site with CF 40 and TF 12 has three times more link volume than link quality. Someone pumped it. A site with CF 30 and TF 25 grew more naturally.

Majestic also publishes topical Trust Flow, the categories the trust comes from. A site with TF 30 concentrated in "Health" is a strong link for a health site and a mediocre one for a fintech. Relevance is a multiplier on every other metric, and most people ignore it entirely.

Thresholds worth enforcing

Hard filters are the cheapest quality control you have. Reasonable defaults for a French or European campaign:

• Trust Flow ≥ 10, since below this you are usually looking at a network site
• TF/CF ratio ≥ 0.35, which filters out the pumped domains
• Estimated monthly traffic ≥ 500, proving the site has real visitors
• Referring domains ≥ 30, proving someone other than the owner links to it
• Topical relevance, meaning the site's category intersects yours

Set these as a floor, not a target. A site scraping past every threshold at the minimum is not a good link, it is a link that survived your filter. Rank the candidates that pass and buy from the top, not the bottom.

The traffic threshold does more work than any other single filter. Applied alone, it removes most of the junk on any marketplace, which is why it belongs in your standard buying checks.

Price is a metric too

Marketplace prices roughly track authority, which means an unusually cheap link on a high-authority site is telling you something.

Common explanations, in order of likelihood: the traffic estimate is stale and the site has lost its rankings; the site sells so many links that yours will sit among fifty others; the authority is inflated and the vendor knows the market has caught on.

Conversely, an expensive link on a modest-looking site is often a genuinely good editorial placement, with real traffic, few outbound links, and a publisher who is selective.

The useful comparison is not price against DR. It is price per estimated monthly visitor. Run that division across a marketplace listing and the ranking changes completely from what the default sort shows you. It also changes how you split a monthly budget across tiers, because the cheapest tier is rarely the cheapest traffic.

What to check before you buy

A short list that catches most bad purchases:

• Does the site have organic traffic proportional to its authority?
• Is TF/CF above 0.35?
• Is the site's topic genuinely adjacent to yours?
• Does the site publish content that is not sponsored?
• Are outbound links per article reasonable, not a link farm?
• Is the language actually the language the listing claims?

That last one catches more problems than you would expect. Marketplace language fields are self-declared and frequently wrong. Sites tagged "fr" that are entirely in another language are common enough that opening the homepage before buying is worth the ten seconds.

If none of this is familiar yet, the beginner's guide to netlinking covers why these links matter in the first place.