PageRank

What Is PageRank?

Although Google discontinued the public PageRank display in 2016, the core principle remains relevant today: links from authoritative sites strengthen your rankings. Every modern link building approach is based on this concept. Third-party metrics like Domain Authority or Domain Rating are attempts to replicate the no-longer-visible PageRank.

PageRank is Google’s historical algorithm for evaluating the link authority of a web page. Google developed PageRank as a core component of its own ranking system and made the formula public — unlike many other ranking factors. The principle is simple: a page gains authority the more high-quality links it receives from other pages. PageRank is one of the oldest and most influential SEO concepts of all time.

Technically, PageRank works like a “voting system”: each website can be thought of as a node in a large graph, and links are connections between these nodes. A page’s PageRank value is calculated based on the pages that link to it and their own PageRank. The formula also takes into account how many outbound links a page has — if a page gives only one link, that link is more valuable than if it gives a hundred links.

In practice, the public PageRank value (formerly visible in the Google Toolbar) has long been discontinued, but Google still uses PageRank internally. For SEO, this means: backlinks remain important, but not all links are equal. A strategy that deliberately targets links from high-quality, topically relevant sites is more valuable than one that simply collects links. The quality of the linking domain is often more important than the sheer number of links.