SEO Company in Charlotte Decodes the Myth of DA, TF, and CF — And Why Google Doesn’t Care About Any of Them

There’s something deliciously ironic about working in an industry that worships numbers, Google doesn’t even use. You’ve probably heard them thrown around like ancient prophecies: “Your Domain Authority is 48, you’re unstoppable!” or “Trust Flow dropped 3 points last week, panic!”

As someone who’s been in the web game long enough to remember when Yahoo Directory links were a thing, I’ve watched SEO morph into a strange brew of science, pseudo-religion, and high-stakes poker. And here’s the kicker — Google doesn’t care about your DA, your TF, or your CF. At least not directly.

That’s not to say they’re entirely useless — more on that in a bit. Still, if you’re optimizing your SEO strategy around numbers created by third-party tools instead of actual search performance, you might be building a sandcastle and calling it a skyscraper.

Let’s unpack why.

The Alphabet Soup of SEO Vanity Metrics

Domain Authority (DA), Trust Flow (TF), and Citation Flow (CF) were designed to simplify the SEO process. DA, created by Moz, is perhaps the most famous. On paper, it estimates the likelihood of a domain ranking in search engines. TF and CF, from Majestic, attempt to measure the quality and volume of backlinks.

Here’s where it gets spicy: Google has never said it uses these. Ever. Google’s John Mueller once said — and I quote — “DA is not something we use.” That’s like Coca-Cola saying they don’t drink soda.

Still, I don’t blame marketers for leaning on these metrics. They’re clean, they’re visual, and they give the illusion of control in an otherwise algorithmic chaos. But it’s kind of like trusting your GPS while it drives you into a lake — helpful until it isn’t.

And yet, every SEO company in Charlotte that doesn’t do their homework keeps regurgitating these figures to clients like gospel. It’s easy. It's comforting. It’s wrong.

Real SEO Is Messy — Just Like the Real World

Now, don’t mistake this rant for cynicism. At Above Bits, we still check DA, TF, and CF from time to time — but the same way a weathered sailor checks the color of the clouds, not because it’s gospel, but because it gives you a hint. We’ve been doing SEO and web development since the days of MS-DOS, and if that doesn’t sound ancient enough, we’ve seen clients ask us if they could “rank by adding more commas.”

If you ask an SEO company in Charlotte what they’re measuring success on, and they say DA went up — that’s not SEO; that’s PowerPoint smoke and mirrors.

What matters instead? Organic traffic. Keyword spread. Click-through rates. Bounce rates. Time on site. Page speed. Server health. Schema. Crawl budgets. Actual content quality — not AI content stitched together from BuzzFeed and Reddit threads.

You’d be surprised how many Fortune 500 companies still get that wrong.

The Numbers Game That Doesn’t Add Up

Let’s dig into how these metrics are created — and why they differ so wildly.

Moz’s Domain Authority uses machine learning to predict rankings. It draws from Moz’s link index, which is significantly smaller than Google’s. Your DA can fluctuate based on the sites around you gaining or losing links. It’s like getting graded on a curve in a class you’re not even in.

Majestic’s Trust Flow focuses on a set of hand-picked “trustworthy” sites. The closer your links are to that seed set, the higher your TF. Sounds okay, but again, Majestic decides which sites are the gold standard. If you get links from CNN but not from their hand-picked ones, guess what? Low TF.

Citation Flow is raw link volume. Think of it as quantity without quality. A site can have a high CF and a low TF — that’s essentially spammy.

If you’re working with an SEO company in Charlotte that tells you TF and CF are the holy grail — well, they may be reading SEO blogs from 2016.

Meanwhile, In the Real World…

Let’s zoom out. In 2024, Google made over 6,000 changes to its search algorithm, according to its transparency report. That’s about 16 changes per day.

Do you think they care that your DA jumped 3 points last week?

Here’s a fact that hit global news: when Google rolled out its March 2024 core update, it wiped out entire backlink networks overnight. Dozens of “SEO link farms” shut down. Agencies that had bragged about their 90+ DA guest posts? Poof. Traffic gone.

One Australian beauty brand saw a 70% drop in traffic overnight because its SEO company was relying entirely on TF-padded backlinks from expired domains. Meanwhile, a tiny florist in North Carolina — one we optimized — climbed to #1 in search results by simply optimizing their site content, image load times, and writing about flower care in a human-friendly manner.

Above Bits knows SEO because we study these patterns. And because we’ve built SEO campaigns through every major Google update since 2006. When people panic after an update, we get emails like, “Wow, everything else fell, but you guys saved us.”

Should We Burn These Metrics to the Ground?

Not quite.

DA, TF, and CF aren’t useless. They can help spot red flags, such as a domain having zero authority across every metric or a backlink coming from a site with 100,000 outbound links and no inbound ones. In other words, these metrics can help prevent bad decisions, but they shouldn’t be used to make them.

A good SEO company in Charlotte will use them the way a pilot uses gauges — as indicators, not instructions. The problem starts when agencies use them as performance KPIs.

Clients fall for it, too. Many businesses pursue DA 50+ guest posts because some articles on LinkedIn suggested so. But guess what? Some of those posts are placed on outdated sites nobody reads. They’re there to game the system, not to help real users.

Google’s latest documentation has emphasized — yet again — the importance of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Not one of those starts with “D” or “T” or “C”.

Tools That Might Matter in 2025

We’ve been testing hundreds of tools at Above Bits — and I’ll be honest: some of the most hyped ones don’t hold up under scrutiny. But some platforms go beyond these surface-level metrics.

Ahrefs, for instance, provides you with much more contextual data, including anchor texts, broken links, ranking volatility, and traffic value. SEMrush adds a visibility index and historical tracking across thousands of keywords. Google Search Console remains underrated for diagnosing indexing issues and tracking real-time keyword impressions.

But here’s the twist: you need someone who can interpret all that. Tools don’t replace people. They augment them.

We’ve had clients from Raleigh to Charlotte to the outskirts of Helsinki come to us after spending thousands on SEO tools that gave them numbers, but no clarity. Tools don’t make decisions. Experts do.

And that’s the line where the gurus of Above Bits in SEO have spent the last two decades.

The Global Wake-Up Call: When Big Brands Get It Wrong

Let’s take a look at something that shook up the SEO industry in a way no DA chart ever could. In early 2023, the BBC’s homepage was briefly de-indexed by Google. That’s right — BBC, one of the most authoritative news outlets on Earth, lost its spot in search because of a technical misconfiguration involving canonical tags and crawl settings.

The takeaway? Google doesn’t care how many backlinks you have or how much trust Moz assigns to you if your technical SEO is broken. This wasn’t about Trust Flow. This was about basic crawlability.

That example became a cautionary tale across SEO conferences from Berlin to Boston. Even in Charlotte, where I often consult businesses through Above Bits, the story has become legendary. Why? Because it proves that no metric — DA, TF, CF, or even your logo on a New York skyscraper — can protect you from poor optimization decisions.

Any good SEO company in Charlotte that knows what they’re doing will prioritize site architecture and crawling logic over vanity metrics. Why? Because Google does, too.

The Real Ranking Factors You Should Care About

Now, let’s finally shift away from what doesn’t matter and talk about what does.

Content quality remains king, but let’s define that. It’s not enough to slap keywords on a blog post. Google now evaluates originality, topical depth, and the presence of first-hand experience. If you're writing about roof repair in Lake Park, and your article sounds like it came from ChatGPT wrapped in Canva, it’s likely to underperform.

Speed is another critical factor. According to Think With Google, 53% of mobile site visitors leave if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That’s global data — from Brazil to Belgium to, yes, North Carolina.

Mobile-first indexing is also fully rolled out. That means your desktop design, no matter how polished, takes a backseat. Google judges your mobile site first. At Above Bits, we optimize every layout for performance on real devices — not just simulators — because we’ve seen how frequently developers overlook mobile experience altogether.

A solid SEO company in Charlotte must also account for structured data, also known as schema markup. That’s what allows your recipes, reviews, events, or FAQs to show up as rich snippets. Without it, your search presence looks like a fax in a TikTok world.

And let’s not forget local SEO. If you’re a Charlotte bakery or Indian Trail law firm, and you’re not showing up on Google Maps because your NAP (name, address, phone) data is inconsistent across platforms, you’ve already lost half the battle. No DA score can help you with that.

When SEO Goes Bad: A Quick Tour of Regrets

There’s a darker side to SEO most blog posts avoid — the damage done by black-hat tactics, misused automation, and greedy resellers.

We had one client from Florida who came to Above Bits with a beautiful new website that wouldn’t rank at all. It turns out that their previous vendor had used expired domain redirections from unrelated Russian blogs to boost their DA. For a few months, their metrics appeared to be great. Then came the Google link spam update, and their traffic dropped by 92% overnight.

It took us months to clean that up: disavow files, content rewrites, and even a complete site migration to start fresh. That’s not uncommon. We’ve seen similar situations in Charlotte as well, where companies unknowingly hired overseas SEO shops that gamed metrics but created no real value.

If you’re hiring an SEO company in Charlotte, ask what they do during a Google core update. If the answer is “we wait and see,” run. At AB, we treat core updates like snowstorms: we prep, monitor, and adapt. We remain honest with our clients at all times.

Why Metrics Persist (Even When They Don’t Matter)

You might wonder why we still talk about DA or TF at all. The answer is psychological. Businesses love neat numbers. They want to “see progress.” If their score goes up, they feel like something good happened, even if traffic stayed flat.

There’s a place for metrics, especially when comparing large volumes of websites for potential outreach. However, using them as performance KPIs is akin to measuring health based solely on BMI — it’s misleading at best.

At Above Bits, we occasionally track DA and similar metrics to identify trends or potential issues. However, our internal reports focus on search visibility, keyword movement, and the impact on revenue. One client even said, “You don’t just do SEO; you run it like a portfolio manager.” That’s precisely what we aim for.

So, if you’re currently stuck with an agency that sends you a monthly “DA went up by 1.5” PDF, it might be time to rethink your SEO relationship.

The Charlotte Factor: What Works Here?

Charlotte, North Carolina, isn’t Silicon Valley — but it’s no small pond either. It’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the Southeast, home to over 900 international companies and a massive surge in local entrepreneurship. Competition is fierce, and local rankings can make or break your business.

Yet, many companies still operate as if Google hasn’t changed since 2010.

A good SEO company in Charlotte understands that what works in a major urban center — such as fast response design, mobile-first speed, GMB optimization, and honest customer reviews — differs from what works in rural markets or nationwide e-commerce.

We’ve helped Charlotte-based clients not only climb the search rankings but also dominate their niche — even when they started with a WordPress site that hadn’t been updated since the Obama administration.

Let’s Bring This Full Circle

Metrics like DA, TF, and CF might give you a sense of progress, but they’re not what moves the SEO needle. If you’re obsessed with chasing those numbers, you might be missing the bigger picture — and wasting money on the wrong strategies.

SEO in 2025 demands adaptability, a deep technical understanding, a genuine content strategy, and ethical practices that avoid triggering subsequent algorithm penalties. That’s where Above Bits comes in.

We’re not just the folks who’ve been around for almost 20 years, though; yes, we've. We’re the people who treat SEO like a craft, not a checklist. Whether you’re Charlotte or somewhere else, we’re here to help you understand what matters.

If you’re ready to ditch vanity metrics and focus on real growth, check out our affordable SEO by Above Bits. We’ll help your site thrive — without the TF fairy dust or DA smoke screens.