PageRank is the algorithm that made Google the dominant search engine in the late 1990s. Named after Google co-founder Larry Page, it was a genuinely revolutionary idea: treat links between web pages as votes of confidence, and rank pages higher based on the quality and quantity of those votes. Decades later, PageRank is still a foundational concept in SEO — but the public PageRank score you might remember is long gone.
How did the original PageRank algorithm work?
The original PageRank algorithm, published by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, worked on a simple but powerful principle: a link from page A to page B is a vote for page B. Not all votes are equal — a vote from a highly authoritative page is worth more than a vote from a low-traffic, low-quality page.
Mathematically, PageRank works like this: imagine all the "authority" on the web as liquid. Each page starts with a small amount of this liquid. When a page links to another page, it shares a fraction of its liquid with the destination. Pages that receive many links from highly authoritative pages accumulate large amounts of this liquid — high PageRank.
This concept — often called "link juice" in SEO — remains central to how backlinks work today, even though the specific implementation has evolved significantly.
Does Google still use PageRank in its algorithm?
Yes — Google has confirmed that PageRank continues to run internally as part of its ranking system. In a 2020 tweet, Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan confirmed PageRank is still used. In Google's "How Search Works" documentation, the company references analysing links as a core ranking process.
What changed is the public visibility and the simplicity. The original algorithm has been augmented with hundreds of additional signals, machine learning models, and contextual understanding that the 1998 version could not account for. Modern Google link authority evaluation considers:
- Topical relevance of the linking page and domain
- The trustworthiness of the linking domain
- The context and anchor text of the link
- The position of the link within the page (editorial content vs footer vs sidebar)
- Whether the link appears to be natural or artificially placed
Why did Google remove the public PageRank score?
The public PageRank score — a simple 0–10 rating visible in the Google Toolbar — was discontinued in March 2016. Google's official reason was that it was rarely updated (sometimes only once or twice a year) and had become so heavily gamed that it was misleading. SEOs and webmasters had learned to buy and sell links based on PageRank values, completely undermining its purpose as an organic authority signal. Removing the public score removed a major manipulation incentive.
What do Moz DA and Ahrefs DR measure in relation to PageRank?
Moz's Domain Authority (DA) and Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR) are both attempts to estimate the same underlying concept that PageRank measures — the relative link authority of a domain based on the quality and quantity of its backlinks. Neither is PageRank. Neither is a Google signal. Both use their own crawled link data and proprietary machine learning models to produce scores from 0 to 100.
As covered in our detailed guide to Domain Authority, these metrics are useful for comparing relative link authority between competing sites — but they are not Google signals and should not be treated as ranking factors in themselves.
How does PageRank flow through a website?
PageRank is passed through links. Every internal and external link on a page distributes a portion of that page's authority to the pages it links to. This has practical implications for site architecture and internal linking:
- Pages linked from your high-authority homepage receive more internal PageRank than pages buried deep in your site structure
- External backlinks pointing to your homepage benefit all pages on your site through internal links from the homepage
- Pages that are poorly internally linked accumulate less PageRank even if they have relevant content
- Nofollow links do not pass PageRank — equity stops at a nofollow link rather than flowing to the destination
Use our internal link checker to identify pages that are poorly linked internally and therefore receiving insufficient PageRank flow from your site's authority.
What is link equity and how is it different from PageRank?
Link equity — sometimes called link juice — is the informal term for the authority and relevance value passed from one page to another through a hyperlink. It is essentially PageRank in practice. When SEOs talk about building links to improve rankings, they are talking about accumulating link equity on their target pages.
The key practical aspects of link equity in 2026:
- Dofollow links pass equity; nofollow, sponsored, and UGC links do not (or pass very little)
- Links from relevant, high-authority pages pass more equity than links from unrelated low-quality pages
- A page's total equity is divided among all the links it contains — fewer outbound links means more equity per link
- Equity can be wasted on redirect chains — direct 301 redirects preserve equity better than multi-hop chains
Summary
- PageRank is Google's original link authority algorithm — links as votes, with more weight given to votes from authoritative pages
- Google still uses PageRank internally as confirmed in 2020, alongside hundreds of other signals
- The public PageRank score (0–10) was discontinued in 2016 — Moz DA and Ahrefs DR are third-party estimates, not replacements
- PageRank flows through links — good internal linking distributes your earned authority to the pages that need it most
- Monitor your link equity distribution with our anchor text analyser and improve internal flow with our internal link checker
Continue reading: How do you optimise images for SEO in 2026?