PageRank

What Is PageRank?

PageRank is Google’s original algorithm, developed by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for scoring a page’s importance based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to it.

How It Worked

PageRank treated each link as a “vote,” with votes from higher-authority pages counting for more than votes from low-authority ones — a page linked to by many important sites would itself become more important, and pass more of that importance on through its own outbound links.

Is It Still Used by Google?

PageRank as originally described is no longer the dominant signal it once was, but its core logic — that links represent a form of trust that can flow between pages — remains foundational to how modern link-based ranking signals, including Domain Rating and similar third-party metrics, still work today. Google has confirmed that some version of PageRank continues to operate as one signal among the hundreds now used in its ranking systems.