What Is PageRank, and Does Google Still Use It?

Few ideas in search have been declared dead as often as PageRank. Every few years someone announces that links no longer matter, usually because the visible score vanished.

The score did vanish. The system behind it never did. Understanding what it actually measures explains a surprising number of traffic drops, especially after migrations and link cleanups.

What PageRank is

PageRank treats a link as a vote of confidence from one page to another. It was developed at Stanford by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who described it in their 1998 paper on the Google search engine. The name comes from Page himself, not from web pages.

Three ideas sit at its core:

• Links are votes. A page that many others link to is probably useful.
• Votes are weighted. A link from a page that is itself well linked counts for more.
• Votes are shared. A page splits the value it passes across all the links it contains.

The original paper framed this as a random surfer: someone clicking links at random, occasionally jumping to a new page. A page’s PageRank was roughly the chance that surfer would be on it at any moment.

A simple example

Imagine two pages, each with one link pointing to your article.

• Page A is a respected guide that hundreds of sites link to, and it contains five outgoing links.
• Page B is a new page nobody links to, and it contains fifty outgoing links.

Under PageRank, the link from Page A is worth far more. It starts with more value and shares it among fewer links. That single idea explains why one link from an authoritative, relevant page can outweigh dozens from directories.

Does Google still use it?

Yes, and Google says so plainly. Its ranking systems guide lists link analysis systems and PageRank among its active systems, describing PageRank as one of the core systems used at launch that continues to be part of core ranking today.

In 2017 Google’s Gary Illyes also confirmed that PageRank was still in use, alongside hundreds of other signals. The important word is alongside. It is one input among many, not the scoreboard it was in 1998.

How it has changed since 1998

• Nofollow arrived in 2005, letting sites mark links that should not pass value. Since 2019 nofollow, sponsored and ugc links are treated as hints rather than strict instructions.
• PageRank sculpting stopped working in 2009. Adding nofollow to some internal links no longer redirects value to the others; that share is simply lost.
• Penguin, launched in 2012, targeted manipulative links and became part of core ranking in 2016, when it began devaluing spammy links rather than demoting whole sites.
• SpamBrain now neutralises link spam, so many bought or networked links simply count for nothing.

Relevance also matters far more than it once did. A link from a respected site in your field carries meaning that a link from an unrelated site does not. The history of Penguin is covered in the Penguin update.

What it means for your site

• Internal links pass value too. Pages linked from your homepage and main hubs receive more of your site’s strength than pages buried deep or not linked at all.
• Orphan pages get almost nothing. A page with no internal links depends entirely on external ones.
• Redirects carry value forward. A permanent redirect passes link value to the new address; a missing one throws it away.
• Earned links from relevant sites are worth more than any number of placed ones.

Checking your own link value

You cannot see PageRank, but Search Console’s Links report shows the raw material it works from.

1. Open Top linked pages under external links. These are the pages other sites point at most.
2. Check each of the top twenty still works. Any that return a 404 or redirect through several steps are wasting the value pointed at them.
3. Open Top linked pages under internal links, and look for important pages near the bottom of the list.
4. Link those pages from your strongest ones, such as the homepage and the pages earning the most external links.

This is the closest practical equivalent to managing PageRank yourself. Fixing a broken page that hundreds of sites still link to is often the fastest link win available, because the links already exist.

PageRank and traffic drops

Link value explains several drops that get blamed on updates.

• A migration that lost redirects cuts off the value of every link pointing at the old addresses. See traffic dropped after a site migration.
• Links that get neutralised during a spam update can make a site slide without any penalty, because value it relied on stops counting.
• A disavow file built from tool scores can throw away links that were helping. See traffic dropped after a disavow file.
• Gradual link loss from closed or redesigned sites can cause a slow decline with no single break date.

None of these show a manual action, and none are fixed by rewriting content. They are fixed by restoring or replacing the links themselves. Genuine link penalties are covered in link penalty recovery.

What PageRank is not

• It is not a number you can see. Google stopped updating the public toolbar score in 2013 and removed it in 2016. The full story is in PageRank history.
• It is not Domain Rating, Domain Authority or Authority Score. Those are third-party estimates built by SEO tool companies. Google does not use them, as explained in why you can’t check PageRank any more.
• It is not the whole of ranking. A page with strong links and poor content can still lose to a better answer.

Where PageRank sits among the other 16 active systems is covered in Google’s ranking systems explained.

Which links Google counts, which it ignores and when it penalises is covered in do backlinks still matter.