Today we can announce that we have categorized the whole web. Not just by website – but every page and sub-domain as well. As we launch, we are showing data for the whole of our Fresh Index – data seen over the last 90 days of web crawling. It is our intention to extend this to our Historic index as well in the near future.
This is a huge leap forward for outreach and inbound marketers, advertising strategists, PR professionals, business analysts, SEOs and no doubt new audiences as well. Previously, the only practical way to look at a set of websites by category was to take them from a manually reviewed directory like the Open Directory Project. If a site was not in there, then it wasn’t classified. If it WAS in there, the whole site was usually tarred with the same category.
Now, we can show the proximity of any page within a site to any topic and we can show the trust we put in our prediction with a new score: Topical Trust Flow.
What? Say that a Different Way!
For each of the 700+ billion pages in our Fresh index, we have worked out the proximity of the page to one of nearly one thousand categories. We have used this to work out the Trust Flow of each page for each category. We have also categorised the Subdomain level and the Root domain level. The screenshot above shows the Root domain categories for the BBC.co.uk. The site is hugely influential when it comes to Arts and Television – but they have no influence when it comes to (say) Automobiles, where they do not score. However, if you pulled up the same chart for the “Top Gear” page on the BBC – a car program on the BBC with a US counterpart, then THIS page has considerable Topical Trust Flow around the automotive industry. Check for yourself.
Why is this SO important?
For the first time, it becomes blatantly obvious why a link “anywhere” on a site isn’t enough… unless that site is very focused.
Until now, all the main data sources have shown a simple score for a page’s trust/authority/rank. Majestic were always trying to be one step ahead with two metrics to help differentiate “size” from “trust” – but even then there was a lack of context. By categorizing Trust Flow into topics, we can help you to be much MUCH more laser-like in your marketing and research, because you will no longer be trying to hunt down the webmaster of (say) Whitehouse.gov when you are trying to build up a reputation for your diamond mining business.
It will also help us to rank websites on our own search engine in the coming months – but right now, this is all about you. What can this do for YOU?
Cool Ways to use Topical Trust Flow
Cool for Finding Influencers
Back last summer we GAVE AWAY a list of the top 50,000 most influential Twitter handles. (You can still download that list here by the way). But without knowing WHY each handle was influential, it’s not always easy to connect with them. Now, however, you can put ANY Twitter handle into Search Explorer and not only can you see their associated Trust Flow overall, but you can see their Topical Trust Flows as well. So above we see two influential people on Twitter. However – let’s look at their Topical Trust Flows against each other and we will find almost no overlap at all:
Obama vs Gaga by Topic:
I say ALMOST no overlap, because our system did seemed to pick up that both “players” get credence from Computers / Internet… because Twitter itself is a big player in that category and these two are big players on Twitter. But the color differences should give you all the clues you need to see their diverse audiences. Makes sense, right?
Cool for: Finding appropriate content
Now that any page can be both categorised and graded with Topical Trust Flow, you can be far more laserlike in your link building. Nearly a 1,000 times more laser-like to be honest. Finding and being connected with pages that have a big Trust Flow in a category/topic that is the same or very close to the page that you have created will help a search engine see how groups of objects on the internet (Not just web pages, but PDF files, people AND of course web pages) should either rise to the surface in a search… or (if the neighborhood is poor) sink like a stone.
Cool for: PPC and advert bid Evaluation
Knowing how many people visit a web page isn’t good enough. If the context sucks, you advert suffers. You can rely on the networks to help you, or you could add this new layer of bid intelligence. Predicting what will “spark” a reader’s interest by knowing the topic of every web page before you have even seen it. How COOL is that?
Other immediate uses
- Business Evaluation Due Diligence
- Traditional Link building (of course)
- Content sculpting
- Penguin Problems
Who can use Topical Trust Flow?
We are really excited about Topical Trust Flow, and our beta testers seem to think we have created something very special too. Give it a try – it’s live on the site now. It has been a massive investment for us – intellectually, time-wise and in terms of infrastructure, so whilst it is available in all its glory for any paid accounts, we have no plans to provide this in free accounts. Accounts start at UK £39.99/US $49.99/EU €46.99 a month, find out more from our plans and pricing page
Can I see more?
We’ll run a webinar on the 30th April where I’ll try to answer any questions. You can register free here for the webinar or just jump right in and use it.
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Is there a way to kmow in which category is classified our website and the categories of our refering domains ?
April 24, 2014 at 3:46 amYes – this is exactly what Topical Trust Flow does. All paid accounts will let you see this for any web page.
April 24, 2014 at 6:36 amWe’ll be adding ability to see that for ref domains and backlinks ASAP!
April 24, 2014 at 11:23 am> Thanks !
April 24, 2014 at 9:33 pmAh! What Alex said! Sorry – I misread your original question.>
April 25, 2014 at 8:02 amHi guys,
I like this new tool, it gonna be really useful. After a few tests I still have some questions :
-Do you put a website in a category based only on backlinks or do you take also the website’s content into account ?
-Can we see somewhere the full tree of categories you’re using ?
Thanks,
Ambre
April 24, 2014 at 8:06 am> We are a little restricted on what we can say, as this is Patent Panding, but I did go into more technical detail at https://plus.google.com/+DixonJonesDotCom/posts/YSbwNXhQRpd as best as I could if you want a look at that.
April 25, 2014 at 4:55 pmThis looks really interesting. Will this ranking also be availible for non englisch language categories ? Like french, German and so on?
April 24, 2014 at 8:19 am> Although we have not labelled the actual categories multilingually at the moment, the system works in the languages you mentioned already. We hope the data there is fairly good. Perhaps people can check a few in their own languages and give us feedback?
April 25, 2014 at 4:50 pmIs the TF of the category calculated by the relevance of the linking pages or the tier 2 backlinks?
E.g. I have a site about cars (lets say cars.com), which has a lot of links from gamings sites and has therefore a high TF in the gaming category.
If I link from cars.com to another site, will that another site be rewarded with a high trust flow in the gaming or in the cars category?
If we just look at the link flow, the high trust comes originally from gaming links, but if we only take a look at the actual linking site, it’s cars.com that has a lot of content related to cars and not gaming.
How does this work?
April 24, 2014 at 12:55 pmA webpage will pass out whatever Topical Trust Flow it gets, if a car site has got links from game sites then it’s possible those links are not very relevant, even though it’s entirely possible for some car related game to link out to real car sites, this is something that needs to be looked at by analyst in context – our new Topical Trust Flow makes it easier to spot such things.
April 25, 2014 at 5:02 pmHas this been integrated into the API and if not are there plans to and what’s the time frame?
Thanks!
April 24, 2014 at 2:53 pm> Yes – it is in some API commands already and is in the documentation, e.g. http://developer-support.majesticseo.com/api/commands/get-index-item-info.shtml see the “UserTrustClassification” parameter. Rest will be there pretty quick I expect.
April 25, 2014 at 4:53 pmHey Dixon,
This is a fantastic effort & achievement. By all accounts, well done.
I’m playing around with it now, but it doesn’t appear to be available in the reports. Is this categorisation only visible on the summary page?
Thanks in advance
April 24, 2014 at 4:51 pmGlad you are liking it. We are adding it to other areas of the site. We wanted to get it live first.
April 25, 2014 at 8:07 amWow the topical trustflow rocks! Thats an awesome improvement, thanks a lot for the new feature.
Maybe due to this all the unrelated linkexchange request will stop?! We’ll see 😉
Cheers
April 28, 2014 at 11:15 amMax
> Glad you like it Guy. Yep. pretty pleased here as well.
April 28, 2014 at 12:23 pmHi there,
Sounds really interesting. How many categories have you got and how accurate your new option is? I mean there should be a certain amount of websites that where attributed to a wrong category…
Thanks,
Helen
April 28, 2014 at 3:02 pmCurrently there are a between 800 and 1,000 categories. We have categorised every PAGE though (as well as every site) so an incorrect attribution will be incorrect for a reason, and if it is your own site then it is well worth investigating why the categorization went wrong… because it may be that this is a misaligned business that is easy to fix. Reasons why a page could be miscategorised are:
1: we do not have an appropriate category for the content. This will be true for adult sites, but also with under 1000 categpries, you cannot expect a category for (say) an individual author or product.
2: the page itself is heavily influenced by the rest of the site’s content. One page on Arts/Music will have trouble standing out against 1,000 pages on Business / Gadgets on the same site
3: The site is blocking our bot so the Topical Trust Flow can’t… flow.
4: The web hosting company is blocking our bot. Big issue… read this by all means.
5: The page or site just has random or irrelevant people linking to it.
That said – most pages are getting categorized pretty accurately at the moment (at least in English).
April 28, 2014 at 3:27 pmThis is not just a great new feature, this is epic. It’s why I’ve always preferred Majestic over others.
By now we all know that Google is doing something similar, and the way you guys display this feature really helps understand that if you do not have links from related websites, things just look odd.
The closer this feature gets to how Google does the same, the more useful it will be. I think Google looks a bit more at the content of the linking site than the way you programmed it, but it’s still very helpful.
April 28, 2014 at 4:36 pmYes. It is epic… but much better for you to say that than us! 🙂
I am convinced Google will calculate things a little differently. They must do because they don’t have Trust Flow 😉 but your point is well made. That said – this is light years ahead of where we all were this time last week, Google or no Google, and as long as our categories look mostly correct and we can explain inconsistencies, then I am happy regardless of Google’s methodology/intent/SERPs. We try not to look to closely at the way they do things. All this data is home grown from our independent crawl and open sources.
April 28, 2014 at 4:46 pmKudos, I noticed that the fresh index is faster than ahrefs’ lately. 90% of my links show in majestic seo. Trust Flow is the main metric is use to evaluate links. keep up the good work
April 28, 2014 at 8:29 pmDear Dixon,
Great job done by your team Congrats but i have few questions to asked if you can clear it that will be very handy for us.
Q1. Categorization is always helps in getting the backlinks to good effect, but what type of things your team have taken in consideration while plotting the backlinks in specific category?
Q2. Are you guys are also working on Page Rank wise backlinks so that new bees or expert user can add the juices ??
Q3. If we download backlinks of the website for example:: Abc.com may be they have 2 Billions Backlinks is their is any system we can get the duplicated backlinks will be deleted once the sheet is downloaded so that we can work on unique numbers of links?
That will be very helpful if just tell also may be you also working on this?
We will be waiting for your reply anxiously.
Thanks
April 29, 2014 at 1:39 amBest Regards
Hi Shah,
April 29, 2014 at 8:01 amQ1: I have said more about this on Google+ for those interested.
Q2: No – we do not use or plan to use PageRank in any form. We feel Topical Trust Flow is stronger than PageRank.
Q3: If you download 2 billion links from one index, they will be unique. It is only if you try to merge both the Fresh index and Historic index that you will get duplicate links. If you wish to manipulate 2 billion links, you should either make strong use of Advanced report filters or build your own cloud infrastucture, because most desk computers will not cope with more than about a million.
Very nice. More information on how users interact with content is a good thing. Now, to see if these metrics turn into results?
Thanks for the update!
April 29, 2014 at 5:14 amI’m sure the webinar will be brilliant but I don’t fancy getting up at 3.30am! Will it be recorded?
April 29, 2014 at 5:18 am50/50… I keep on messing up the recordings. But I’ll try and we’re working on a training video too.
April 29, 2014 at 7:50 amI was wondering with this new feature, would I be able to upload a list of sites to Majestic and obtain individual categorisation for each one?
Regards,
April 29, 2014 at 8:21 amChris
Yes – certainly. You can already upload up to 100,000 here and get overall Trust Flow. We are intergrating Topical Trust Flow into these reports as a matter of priority now. If your list also includes lots of links that we may have never seen before, that upload file tab (which needs a paid account) also had the option to: “Also submit URLs to Majestic SEO’s crawler”. That can be very handy if you are trying to categorise the export from GWT for example. It will take a few days if the file upload is large for all the URLs to appear categorized – but thereafter we should be able to keep tabs on these for you. We don’t guaranteee crawling each one, but it seems to work pretty well.
April 29, 2014 at 9:54 amVery nice feature. Are you (MajesticSEO) already studying the correlation between the Topical trust flow & the SERP results? Or is that more for a MOZ-agency to do?
I’m really curious what the true effect is, rather than that “topical identical links are better”.
April 29, 2014 at 9:25 amKarel – that’s a spot on question! 🙂
April 29, 2014 at 9:58 amWe probably won’t do this research directly, but I can imagine people will. Because we don’t touch Google’s SERPS, we can’t extract the data on a large scale and we also don’t want to buy the data from third parties. I think, though, that we would be interested in seeing such research. We may be able to come up with tools to help people do this… but I would expect a third party OpenApps developer would be able to create such a tool.
Is there anyway to see the pages which are stronger under each category or topic?
For example: one of our client who is a wholesale giftware store is showing a reasonable topical trust flow for the category “Health & Medicine”. Just wondering how this category was related to the business.
April 30, 2014 at 2:29 amHi Karhik,
Short answer is – yes, we are working on rolling out Topical Trust Flow across other parts of the system which should give you several ways to see this. However – be wary of understanding the numbers. If the top category has a value of (say) 35 and then the second category has (say) 31 then there is MUCH MORE influence for the first category… maybe twice as powerful as the second. This is because these numbers are (a) logorithmic in nature, not proportional to each other and (b) are calculated relative to each category – so the competition in each category will differ, thus affecting the scores independently of each other.
Once you have got your head around that – then we have tried to visually show the RELATIVE weightings in the colours around the Trust Flow Circle. Here you will see that the first category colour is often (but not always) a much larger proportion of the pie than the absolution numbers suggest. If the largest chunk of the pie is in the correct category, that’s great. If not, then it is definitely best to dig down and see why. We hope those tools will start rolling out pretty quickly now. We know people will be looking forward to them.
April 30, 2014 at 9:39 amthanks for confirmation
May 1, 2014 at 2:19 pmmay be useful for me
Can I access/download a full list of all categories somewhere that majestic uses for it’s topical trust flow?
Thanks
May 6, 2014 at 7:13 amHi, the categories are still in a little bit of a state if flux as we refine and improve them. When we have, we can consider releasing them. However, we initially looked at the categories from DMOZ for inspiration. These are not a perfect match now (and you certainly do not need to be in DMOZ to be categorised) but these categories should give you a good idea.
May 6, 2014 at 7:21 amHi Dixon,
I am still trying to analyse this feature properly, I downloaded the report and I went through some of the categories and I din’t understand what does Regional Category stand for? Like for some xyz.com website it show Regional/Asia so if it means to what region the website belongs then this categorization should be done for every site but it is only done for some source urls.
May 7, 2014 at 11:58 amHi Angelina,
Regional subcategory contains many sites whose topic is about places in that particular region, ie – site dedicated to parks in New York. We’ve done our best to make sure Topical Trust Flow works for as many sites as possible and we’ll make some improvements shortly that would hopefully improve classification further.
May 7, 2014 at 12:33 pmOK. And to how many tier does your trust flow transfer. Is it a 2 tier process or n-tier process?
May 7, 2014 at 1:07 pmMultiple (n) tiers. Many more than 2. We do not publicize the exact number of iterations.
May 7, 2014 at 1:32 pm