Updated August 2026: this article replaces an obsolete Flash tutorial with current information.
PageRank is a system originally developed to understand the importance of web pages through their links. In simple terms, a link can act as a signal from one page to another, and signals from important pages are not all treated equally.
PageRank is not a public scorecard
The old Google Toolbar displayed a simplified PageRank score, which led to years of score-chasing and link trading. That toolbar measurement is gone. Third-party “authority” metrics can be useful for comparative research, but they are estimates created by those providers and are not Google’s PageRank.
One system among many
Google says link analysis and PageRank remain part of its core ranking systems, while also explaining that the system has evolved substantially. Relevance, content quality, usability, freshness and many other systems can affect which results are served. A link metric alone cannot predict a ranking.
What website owners should do
- Create material worth referencing.
- Use internal links to connect related pages and make important content discoverable.
- Use descriptive link text that helps people understand the destination.
- Avoid buying, exchanging or automating links to manipulate rankings.
The useful lesson from PageRank is that the web’s connections matter. The unhelpful lesson is reducing SEO to a single number.
Further reading: Google’s guide to ranking systems.