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Majestic

Majestic is the longest-running backlink intelligence service. It's particularly strong on Trust Flow + Citation Flow: the two metrics most agencies use to qualify a backlink prospect.

What you get

  • Trust Flow (0-100): predicted trust based on the quality of links pointing to a domain
  • Citation Flow (0-100): predicted influence based on how many links point to a domain
  • Topical Trust Flow: Trust Flow broken down by topic category (the niche signal)
  • Backlinks: referring IPs, referring subnets, fresh vs. historic indexes
  • Anchor text distribution: top anchors with link counts

Getting your API key

Majestic uses an OpenApp API model. Their pricing is per-resource, not per-call.

  1. Sign in to Majestic.
  2. Open Tools → API → Your API Account.
  3. Generate (or copy) your App API Key. It's a long alphanumeric string.

You'll also need an active Majestic subscription with backlink credit balance. The API draws from the same pool as the web UI.

Adding it to SEO Dash

  1. Settings → SEO Data
  2. Paste your key into the Majestic API Key field
  3. Click Save
  4. Open /backlinks for any site. The Majestic columns populate within ~1 minute.

How resources are spent

Majestic charges per GetBacklinks call (the heaviest endpoint). SEO Dash:

  • Pulls GetIndexItemInfo (Trust + Citation Flow) once per site per refresh. Cheap.
  • Pulls GetBacklinks only when the user explicitly clicks Refresh backlinks. Up to 1,000 rows per call.
  • Caches both for the period defined in Settings → SEO Data → Refresh cadence.

Combined views

Same shape as the other backlink providers. Majestic columns merge with Ahrefs / Moz / SEMrush on the Backlinks page. The Topic Authority page (per-site) also surfaces Majestic's Topical Trust Flow as a category-level signal alongside your GSC topical clusters.

Troubleshooting

  • 403 errors: your account is out of resources, or the API key is wrong. The dashboard falls back to cached values.
  • No Topical Trust Flow: only available on Majestic Pro+ plans.