PageRank

PageRank is Google's original algorithm for scoring a page's importance based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to it. It still runs inside Google's ranking systems today, which is why link building remains a thing: every link you earn or lose nudges a real, live signal, not a historical curiosity.

Where PageRank came from

Larry Page and Sergey Brin built PageRank at Stanford in the late 1990s, and it was the core idea that separated early Google from AltaVista and friends. The insight: treat a link as a vote, but weight each vote by the importance of the page casting it. A link from one heavily-linked page can outweigh a hundred links from pages nobody links to.

The classic formula from the original paper looks like this:

PR(A) = (1 - d) + d * ( PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn) )

In plain English: page A's PageRank is a base value plus a share of the PageRank of every page T that links to it, where each linking page's contribution is divided by C, its number of outgoing links. The damping factor d (0.85 in the paper) models a surfer who eventually gets bored and jumps to a random page instead of clicking forever. Two practical consequences fall out of that math and still shape how we work:

• A page splits its votable value across all its outgoing links. A link from a page with 12 links passes more than a link from a page with 400.
• PageRank is recursive. You can't compute one page's score in isolation; value flows through the whole link graph, which is why internal linking moves rankings at all. The related concept of link equity is basically practitioner shorthand for this flow.

The toolbar era and its death

For years Google exposed a public 0–10 PageRank score in the Google Toolbar. It was a crude, log-scaled, months-stale snapshot of the internal value, and the industry promptly built an entire economy on it: links were bought and sold priced by the green pixels of the linking page. Google stopped refreshing the public score in December 2013 and removed it from the toolbar entirely in April 2016. Toolbar PR is dead. Internal PageRank is not.

Yes, Google still uses it

Googlers have confirmed this on the record more than once — Gary Illyes stated in 2017 that Google still uses PageRank after 18 years. The original patent has since expired and the modern implementation is not the 1998 formula (Google engineers have described moving to more efficient approximations, and the "reasonable surfer" patent weights links by how likely a user is to actually click them, so a footer link is worth less than an in-content link). But a link-graph importance score remains one of the inputs to ranking. When someone tells you "PageRank doesn't exist anymore," they're confusing the dead toolbar with the living algorithm.

PageRank timeline: what actually changed

How to check it (since you can't see it)

There is no way to read Google's internal PageRank. What you can do is audit the raw material it's computed from — your links:

1. Open Google Search Console → Links. The "Top linked pages" and "Top linking sites" reports show what Google itself knows about your external links, free.
2. Pull the same picture from a third-party index — Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free for verified sites), Moz Link Explorer, or Majestic — and compare. Majestic's Citation Flow is the closest public imitation of raw PageRank-style link juice.
3. For internal PageRank, crawl your own site with Screaming Frog and use its built-in Link Score, which runs a PageRank-style calculation over your internal link graph. Pages you care about should score high; if your money pages sit five clicks deep with a weak score, that's the fix.
4. Check server logs or the GSC Crawl Stats report: Google tends to crawl high-PageRank URLs more often, so crawl frequency is a rough, indirect proxy.

Common mistakes

• Chasing metrics labeled "PR" in 2026. Anything sold by toolbar PageRank is fossil-based marketing. Fix: evaluate links by relevance, traffic, and the linking page's own link profile.
• Treating all links on a page as equal. A blogroll link among 300 others passes a sliver of value. Fix: prioritize in-content links from pages with few outgoing links.
• Ignoring internal links because "PageRank is about backlinks." Internal links distribute the PageRank your domain already has. Fix: link your important pages prominently from your strongest pages — our internal link sculpting guide covers this without the myths.
• PageRank sculpting with nofollow. Dead since 2009. Fix: control flow with site architecture, not link attributes.

FAQ

Is PageRank still a ranking factor?

Yes. Google has confirmed it still uses PageRank internally. It's one signal among many, and far less dominant than in 2003, but links remain one of the stronger levers you can pull.

Can I see my PageRank anywhere?

No. The public score died in 2016. Third-party scores (DA, DR, Citation Flow) are independent estimates built from independent link indexes — useful for comparison, but nobody outside Google sees the real number.

Does every link pass PageRank?

No. Links marked nofollow, sponsored, or ugc generally don't (Google treats them as hints since 2019), links Google considers spam are ignored, and links in JavaScript that never renders may never be seen.

Do outgoing links drain my PageRank?

Linking out divides the value your page passes onward; it doesn't lower the page's own score. Sites that link to good sources do fine. Hoarding links makes pages worse for users and buys you nothing measurable.