What is PageRank?
PageRank is the idea Google was built on. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as Stanford students in the late 1990s, proposed that a link from one page to another is a vote, and that a vote from a page with many votes of its own is worth more. Run that calculation across the whole web, over and over until the numbers settle, and every page ends up with a score. Pages with a high score rank higher for the queries they are relevant to.
The score was once public. Google's browser toolbar showed a green bar from 0 to 10 for whatever page you were on, and an entire industry grew up around moving that bar. Google stopped updating the public number in 2013 and removed it in 2016. The algorithm itself did not go anywhere; it is still one of many signals inside the ranking system, just no longer visible.
Why it matters
Why PageRank matters
PageRank is why links matter. Every piece of advice about earning links, avoiding bought links and sending authority around a site with internal links descends from it. It is the reason a mention in a national newspaper is worth more than a hundred directory listings, and the reason a brand's own site gets stronger as the brand gets talked about.
It also explains a lot of behavior that looks irrational. Link selling, link farms, reciprocal link schemes and the spam fights of the 2000s were all attempts to manufacture PageRank, and most of Google's anti-spam policies exist to protect it.
In practice
How PageRank works in practice
- 01
Conceptually, every page starts with a small amount of authority and passes it along its outbound links, split between them. A page with ten links shares its vote ten ways; a page with one link gives that page nearly all of it. Links marked nofollow, sponsored or UGC are excluded, so a paid placement or a comment link does not count as a vote. The result is a web-wide score that reflects how well connected a page is, weighted by who is doing the connecting.
- 02
Nobody outside Google sees the real number anymore. The industry uses proxies: Domain Authority from Moz, Domain Rating from Ahrefs, Authority Score from Semrush. They are modeled on the same idea and are useful for comparing sites, but they are estimates, not PageRank. Inside a site, the practical lever is internal linking: the pages you link to most from the pages with the most authority are the pages you are telling Google matter.
Watch out
What people get wrong about PageRank
Assuming it is dead because the toolbar is. Google has confirmed repeatedly that PageRank is still used, in an evolved form, alongside hundreds of other signals. What died was the public score, and with it the game of chasing a number.
The other mistake is treating a third-party authority score as if it were the real thing. Those metrics move when the tool's index changes, not when Google's does. They are a thermometer for one room, not the weather.
