PageRank is one of the original algorithms Google used to rank web pages, based on the idea that a page’s importance can be measured by the quantity and quality of other pages linking to it. It was co-developed by Google founder Larry Page and named partly after him.
While Google no longer publicly displays a PageRank score, and the original algorithm has been heavily modified and supplemented over the decades, the underlying concept — that links act as “votes” of credibility between pages — remains a foundational principle behind modern link building and off-page SEO.
Google has confirmed that some evolved version of the original PageRank concept is still used internally as one of many ranking signals, even though it’s no longer a standalone, publicly visible metric.
Understanding link equity concepts rooted in PageRank informs our approach to link building.