Which metric is generally used to evaluate the quality of backlinks?

The choice of Trust Flow as a metric to evaluate the quality of backlinks is well-founded. Trust Flow measures the trustworthiness of a website based on its backlink profile. Developed by Majestic SEO, this metric assesses the quality of backlinks pointing to a site rather than just their quantity. A high Trust Flow score indicates that a site receives links from other high-quality, trustworthy websites, suggesting that the backlinks are likely to be from reputable sources. This is critical for SEO because backlinks from trustworthy sites can significantly enhance a website's credibility and authority in the eyes of search engines.

In contrast, Citation Flow, while also a Majestic metric, focuses on the quantity of backlinks rather than their quality, which can lead to a misleading assessment of a site's backlink profile. Page Rank, an algorithm created by Google, was once widely used to evaluate the quality of backlinks but is no longer publicly updated and has been largely replaced by more advanced metrics. Keyword density is not a relevant metric for evaluating backlinks at all; instead, it measures how often a keyword appears in relation to the total word count of a webpage, focusing on on-page SEO rather than off-page backlinks.