PageRank
Also called: page rank, PR, Google PageRank
PageRank is Google's original link-analysis algorithm that scores a web page's importance by the quantity and quality of other pages linking to it, treating each link as a weighted vote. Created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford in 1998, it still runs inside Google's ranking systems.
How PageRank works
PageRank models a “random surfer” who keeps clicking links and occasionally jumps to a random page. The long-run chance of landing on any given page is that page’s score. A damping factor (d, usually set around 0.85) is the probability the surfer keeps clicking instead of restarting, which is why a single link never passes 100% of a page’s value.
A simplified form of the equation:
PR(A) = (1 − d)/N + d × Σ(PR(i) / L(i))
Each linking page i splits its own PageRank across its L(i) outbound links. So one link from a strong, focused page can outweigh dozens from weak, link-stuffed ones. Quality and topical relevance matter more than raw count.
The public number is long gone. Google stopped updating the Toolbar PageRank score (the old 0 to 10 scale) in 2013 and removed it in 2016. The algorithm did not die with it. Google’s March 2024 API documentation leak referenced several internal variants (RawPageRank, PageRank2, PageRank_NS), confirming link importance is still computed. Third-party metrics like Domain Rating or Domain Authority estimate the same concept, but they are vendor approximations, not Google’s actual figures.
How it affects your traffic
PageRank is the core reason link building still moves rankings. Pages and domains that earn links from relevant, trusted sites accumulate importance, and that value flows through internal links to your money pages, helping them rank for competitive queries and get crawled and indexed faster. A thin link profile caps how high you can rank no matter how good the content is. A few strong, editorially given links usually beat chasing volume, which is exactly what our Link Building service focuses on.
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