MozTrust

MozTrust is a metric from Moz that scores how trustworthy a web page is, based on its link distance from a set of hand-picked, highly credible seed sites. Where MozRank measures raw link popularity, MozTrust answers a different question: how close, within the web of links, a given page sits to trusted authorities.

How MozTrust works

The idea behind MozTrust descends from the TrustRank concept — trust propagates through links, decaying with each additional hop from the source. The starting point is a set of pages considered unambiguously credible (government, educational or renowned institutional sites). The key principles:

• Trust seed — a manually selected set of pages of unquestioned credibility, from which distance is measured.
• Trust decay — the more clicks separate a page from a trusted source, the lower its MozTrust.
• Spam resistance — sheer link volume does not raise trust if those links come from domains far removed from credible sources.

MozTrust in practice

MozTrust added a qualitative dimension to the picture of a link profile:

1. Detecting artificial link profiles — high MozRank with low MozTrust signals links from low-quality link farms.
2. Assessing domain credibility — comparing your site's trust against competitors.
3. Planning link building — acquiring backlinks from domains close to trusted sources.
4. Filtering link candidates — rejecting low-trust domains that could harm the link profile.

Conceptually, MozTrust is close to Majestic's modern Trust Flow metric. Although Moz eventually consolidated its metrics around Domain Authority, the underlying idea — measuring trust by proximity to credible sources — remains relevant in link-quality analysis.