What Is Google PageRank?
Google PageRank is an algorithm that measures how important a webpage is, based on the number and quality of other pages linking to it. Created by Google’s founders in 1996, it treats each link like a vote: pages with more votes — especially from other important pages — are considered more trustworthy and rank higher.
You won’t find a public PageRank score anymore. Google retired that feature back in 2016. But the idea behind it never went away, and understanding it still helps explain why backlinks matter so much in SEO.
How Does PageRank Work?
The concept behind PageRank is easier to grasp than the math behind it.
Links Work Like Votes
Imagine every link to your website as a small vote of confidence. If ten different websites link to one of your pages, Google reads that as ten signals saying, “this page is worth looking at.” The more of these votes a page collects, the more authority Google assumes it has.
Not Every Vote Counts the Same
Here’s the part people usually miss: not all votes are equal. A link from a well-established, trustworthy website carries far more weight than a link from a brand-new or low-quality one. A page’s own authority also gets divided among all the links it sends out — so a link from a page with 50 outgoing links passes on less value than a link from a page with just 3.
This is why SEO advice keeps circling back to the same point: a handful of links from respected websites usually helps more than dozens of links from low-quality ones.
A Brief History of PageRank
PageRank isn’t a recent idea — it’s the algorithm Google was built on.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1996 | Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford University, start developing PageRank as a research project. |
| 1998 | The PageRank patent is filed (January 9), and Google Inc. is founded later that year. |
| 2000 | Google launches the Toolbar PageRank, a public score from 0–10 shown in the Google Toolbar. |
| 2011 | The Google Directory, which had ranked sites by PageRank, is shut down. |
| 2013 | The public Toolbar PageRank score is updated for the last time. |
| 2016 | Google officially removes the public PageRank score for good. |
| 2018 | The original PageRank patent expires and enters the public domain. |
| 2024 | A leak of internal Google documentation confirms PageRank is still used internally, in several updated forms. |
Is Google PageRank Still Used Today?
Yes — just not the way it used to be. Google retired the public score in 2016 because it was being manipulated and gave website owners a misleading, oversimplified number to obsess over. That’s different from the algorithm itself, which never disappeared.
A 2024 leak of internal Google Search documentation confirmed that PageRank still runs behind the scenes, in more than one form. It’s no longer a single, standalone score, though — it’s one signal among the roughly 200 factors Google’s ranking systems now take into account.
Toolbar PageRank vs. Today’s PageRank
A lot of the confusion around this topic comes from mixing up two different things:
| Toolbar PageRank (2000–2016) | PageRank today | |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility | Public score from 0–10 | Internal only, not shown to anyone |
| Update frequency | Occasional, manual updates | Continuous, as part of Google’s live systems |
| Role in ranking | A standalone metric SEOs tracked closely | One signal among ~200 ranking factors |
| Risk of manipulation | High — led to link-buying and spam | Google adjusts for manipulation attempts |
Does PageRank Still Matter for SEO in 2026?
In principle, yes: link-based authority is still part of how Google evaluates pages. In practice, chasing “PageRank” as a number makes little sense anymore, since there’s nothing to measure it by. What still matters is the behavior PageRank rewards:
- Earning links from relevant, trustworthy websites
- Building a website structure where authority flows well between pages
- Avoiding spammy or manipulative link schemes
Third-party tools like Domain Authority or Authority Score try to estimate a similar idea using their own data and formulas, but they’re not the same thing as Google’s internal PageRank — think of them as educated guesses, not the real number.
How to Improve Your Site’s PageRank (Even Without Seeing the Score)
You can’t check a page’s PageRank anymore, but you can still work on the things it was designed to measure:
- Earn backlinks from relevant, reputable sites instead of chasing volume.
- Link to your own important pages from other strong pages on your site — internal links pass authority too.
- Avoid orphan pages that have no internal links pointing to them, since they’re cut off from that flow of authority.
- Stay away from link schemes, like buying links or joining link exchange networks, which Google actively works to detect.
- Clean up broken or toxic backlinks that could be dragging a page’s authority down.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I check my website’s PageRank score?
No. Google removed the public PageRank score in 2016, and there’s no official way to see it today. Third-party metrics like Domain Authority or Authority Score are estimates, not the real thing.
Is PageRank the same as Domain Authority?
No. Domain Authority is a metric created by an SEO software company to estimate a site’s overall strength. PageRank is Google’s own internal algorithm. They’re related in spirit but calculated completely differently.
Did Google really get rid of PageRank?
Google only removed the public score. The underlying algorithm is still part of how Google evaluates links today, as confirmed by leaked internal documentation in 2024.
What was the highest PageRank score a page could get?
The public Toolbar PageRank scale ran from 0 to 10, though very few pages — mostly extremely authoritative sites — ever reached the top of that scale.