PageRank

PageRank is an algorithm created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, that scores a web page's importance based on the number and quality of links pointing to it. It was one of the search engine's earliest ranking mechanisms and a big part of why Google stood out from its competitors in the late 1990s.

How PageRank works

The core idea treats every link as a kind of vote cast for the target page. The more valuable sites link to a page, the higher its PageRank score. Crucially, it isn't just about counting links but weighting them: a vote from a popular, authoritative site passes more value than a link from an obscure one.

That value — commonly called link juice — is distributed across all the outbound links on a page, so if a site links out to many URLs, each receives a correspondingly smaller share. The algorithm runs iteratively, recalculating scores across the whole web of links until the values stabilize.

Practical application

Although Google stopped publishing a public PageRank score years ago, the principle of judging a page by its link profile remains a foundation of SEO. That is why link building strategies focus on earning links from trusted, topically relevant sources rather than chasing raw volume.

Today, third-party metrics such as Domain Rating and Domain Authority have taken the place of the public PageRank, estimating link strength in a similar way. The PageRank concept also shaped internal practices like deliberate internal linking, which channels authority toward a site's most important pages.