PageRank
PageRank is the original algorithm Google's founders developed to rank web pages by counting and weighing the quality of links pointing to them — a foundational concept in search, though today's ranking system is far more complex and uses hundreds of additional signals.
Updated
November 12, 2026
Category
SEO Glossary
The core original insight behind PageRank was recursive: a link from an important page counts for more than a link from an unimportant one, and a page's own importance is itself determined by the importance of the pages linking to it — a self-reinforcing calculation. Modern Google ranking has evolved enormously beyond this single signal, incorporating content quality, user experience, E-E-A-T factors, and increasingly sophisticated language understanding, but the underlying idea that links function as a vote of confidence remains foundational to how backlinks are still understood to work today. Google stopped publicly updating the visible PageRank toolbar score in 2016, and the concept is now mostly discussed historically or conceptually rather than as an active, checkable metric.
Example
Understanding PageRank's original 'links as votes' concept still helps explain, in simplified form, why a link from an authoritative, well-linked page passes more value than a link from an obscure, poorly-linked one.
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