This is a preview from my new ebook – Strategic SEO 2025 – a PDF which is available to download for free here.
Google’s original PageRank algorithm, developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, assigns an importance score to each webpage based on the web’s link structure.
The basic idea is that a page is considered more important if many other important pages link to it.
As Google’s early patent (Lawrence Page, U.S. Patent 6,285,999) explains, “a document should be important (regardless of its content) if it is highly cited by other documents. Not all citations, however, are necessarily of equal significance.
A citation from an important document is more important than a citation from a relatively unimportant document… [Thus] the rank of a document is a function of the ranks of the documents which cite it.” patents.google.com
In practice, the PageRank of a page A is defined recursively:
r(A)=1−dN + d∑i=1nr(Bi)L(Bi), r(A) = \frac{1 – d}{N} \;+\; d \sum_{i=1}^{n} \frac{r(B_i)}{L(B_i)} ,r(A)=N1−d+d∑i=1nL(Bi)r(Bi),
where B1…BnB_1 \ldots B_nB1…Bn are pages linking to A, L(Bi)L(B_i)L(Bi) is the number of outgoing links from page BiB_iBi, N is the total number of pages, and d is a damping factor (usually set around 0.85): patentimages.storage.googleapis.com and snap.stanford.edu.
In other words, “the ranks form a probability distribution over web pages, so that the sum of all Web pages’ PageRanks will be one,” and the rank of a page can be interpreted as “the probability that a random web surfer ends up at the page after following a large number of forward inks.”: patentimages.storage.googleapis.com
Because a random surfer occasionally jumps to a random page with probability (1–d), even pages with few links can get some baseline rank.
This elegant link analysis makes PageRank an objective measure of a page’s citation importance.
As Brin and Page noted in their 1998 research paper, “PageRank…corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an excellent way to prioritise the results of web keyword searches.”: snap.stanford.edu
How it was used: In Google’s early search engine, PageRank was a core ranking signal used to “prioritise” or weight search results. Google even had Google Toolbar Updates back in the day.
Pages with higher PageRank (i.e. more or better-quality backlinks) tended to rank higher in the “10 blue links” results, all else being equal.
PageRank was computed offline by iteratively propagating link weights, and Google updated these scores periodically.
By the early 2000s, Google even exposed a rough 0–10 PageRank score via the browser Toolbar, underscoring how central it was to ranking.
Importantly, even from the start, Google recognised that PageRank was one signal among many – it improves relevance when combined with content-based scoring.
Nonetheless, it became the foundation of Google’s ranking, embodying the principle that “links…are votes of support” and that pages “endorsed by many high-quality sites” should be ranked as more authoritative.
What SEOs said at the time
- Key Internal Details (Google): Google’s original ranking algorithm, PageRank, assigns each page a numerical importance score based on backlinks. In Larry Page’s formulation, a page’s rank is calculated from the ranks of pages linking to it hobo-web.co.uk. PageRank is query-independent – it condenses the entire web’s link graph into a “global ranking of all Web pages, regardless of content, based solely on backlinks” patents.google.com. Early on, Google noted that even low-quality pages contribute a minimum PageRank, so creating many interlinked dummy pages could artificially inflate a target page’s score patents.google.com. Google addressed link spam with later patent tweaks (e.g. weighting links from sites with many pages) patents.google.com, but PageRank remained a core baseline in the ranking system gofishdigital.com.
- Observations (Bill Slawski, Jim Boykin) : Some SEOs recognised PageRank’s central role and pitfalls. As early as 2007 on an article I commented on, Jim Boykin discussed “old BackRub techniques with some TrustRank thrown in,” acknowledging the link-vote model behind ranking internetmarketingninjas.com. Bill Slawski frequently analyzed Google’s link algorithms, noting the vulnerability of PageRank to spam farms and reciprocal “endorsement” loops patents.google.com. He explained that many low-value links can still boost a page since “every linking page is guaranteed to have a minimum PageRank… links from many such low quality pages can still inflate the PageRank score.” patents.google.com Slawski also highlighted Google’s attempts to dampen manipulation, like the “reasonable surfer” model giving different weight to links patents.google.com. At the time, we advised that PageRank is essentially a measure of link-derived authority – “rank assigned to a document is calculated from the ranks of documents citing it” hobo-web.co.uk – a point that aligned exactly with Google’s own definition.
- Notable Quotes/Metaphors: Bill often described backlinks as votes or peer reviews. He quoted Google’s description that PageRank uses “information external to webpages – their backlinks – which provide a kind of peer review. Backlinks from ‘important’ pages are considered more significant… by recursive definition.”patents.google.com This metaphor of link votes anticipated Google’s internal thinking. Myself, in practical guides, emphasized that “Google has long worked [by displaying] organic results based on KEYWORDS and LINKS” hobo-web.co.uk – effectively telling SEOs that link authority (PageRank) still underpins rankings.
- Accuracy in Hindsight: While we didn’t know for sure at the time, our perspectives on PageRank were highly accurate. PageRank indeed proved to be the foundational ranking factor Google used, and their advice to acquire quality backlinks was prescient. Slawski’s early warnings about link spam mirror the tactics Google fought internally patents.google.com. Over time Google integrated many other signals, but as late as the DOJ trial (2023) it was confirmed that PageRank (or its derivatives) remains in use.
TrustRank: Incorporating Link Trust
As the web grew, link spam (artificial link networks or “link farms”) began to undermine PageRank’s reliability.
In response, researchers (including some later Googlers) developed TrustRank, an evolution of PageRank that emphasises link trustworthiness over raw link popularity.
A Google patent on link-spam detection defines TrustRank as “a link analysis technique related to PageRank” and “a method for separating reputable, good pages on the Web from web spam.” It works on the presumption that good (non-spam) websites seldom link to spam sites patents.google.com.
TrustRank involves two steps: first, human experts identify a small seed set of highly trustworthy pages; second, a score propagation algorithm spreads a “trust score” outwards through the link graph.
As the patent explains, “TrustRank involves two steps, one of seed selection and another of score propagation. [Thus] the TrustRank of a document is a measure of the likelihood that the document is a reputable (i.e., non-spam) document.” patents.google.com
Google implemented this concept internally to downweight webspam and promote authoritative content.
Rather than counting all backlinks equally, links from a trusted seed page confer more value.
In effect, this is like running a biased PageRank that starts from trusted nodes.
A later Google patent describes “select[ing] a few ‘trusted’ pages (also referred to as seed pages) and [finding] other pages likely to be good by following the links from the trusted pages.” patents.google.com
By crawling outward from a set of “high-quality seed pages” and measuring link distance (hops or weighted path length) to other pages, Google can compute a trust score for each page based on proximity to trusted sites.
Pages closely linked to the trusted seeds receive higher trust scores, while those deep in the link graph or mainly linked from untrusted sources are deemed less reliable.
This distance ranking approach was patented by Google and reduces the influence of spam farms: “good documents on the Web seldom link to spam” and thus spam pages end up many link-hops away from the reputable core patents.google.com.
In practice, Google could use TrustRank to demote or filter pages with high PageRank but low trust.
One Google filing notes that the system may compute a “discrepancy between the link-based popularity (e.g. PageRank) and the trustworthiness (e.g. TrustRank) of a given web document” to catch artificially boosted pages patents.google.com.
In essence, a page with many inbound links might still rank poorly if those links come from low-trust sources.
By the late 2000s, Google’s ranking algorithm quietly incorporated such link quality assessments to complement raw link count, reinforcing the mantra that not all links are equal.
Usage: TrustRank (and related “link distance” signals) are used internally as part of Google’s ranking and anti-spam systems.
Though Google did not publicly call it “TrustRank” by name, Google engineers have affirmed the concept.
For example, a Google patent by the company’s researchers explicitly describes using “a seed set of reputable documents” with trust values, then propagating those trust values to linked pages.
This helps assign each page a trust score that can modify its ranking. In summary, TrustRank evolved PageRank by adding a notion of link reliability, ensuring that a page’s rank reflects not just the quantity of links, but the quality and trustworthiness of those link sources.
- Observations (Bill Slawski): Bill Slawski closely followed Google’s moves on trust. He noted that “Google Trustrank is very different from Yahoo TrustRank… Yahoo’s TrustRank [identifies] spam, whereas Google developed a system for reordering rankings of web pages” based on trust signals seonorth.caseonorth.ca. Years before Google’s trial revelations, Slawski discussed patents on using trusted seed sites to influence rank. He cited one Google patent wherein “the system…assigns lengths to links…computes the shortest distances from seed pages to each page…[and] determines a ranking score for each page based on the computed shortest distances.” gofishdigital.com In plainer terms, Bill explained that pages closer (in link hops) to authoritative sites would rank higher, capturing the essence of “TrustRank” as “distance from authority sites”.
- Slawski explicitly connected Google’s trust metrics to the “distance between documents.” He highlighted that Yahoo’s TrustRank “diminishes with increased distance between documents”, requiring carefully chosen seed sets seonorth.caseonorth.ca – a concept Google mirrored. In a 2019 analysis, Bill wrote that Google had a patent for ranking based on how “close or distant [pages] might be to a set of trusted seed sites” gofishdigital.com. This “seed set distance” metaphor was essentially Bill translating Google’s internal method into SEO-friendly terms. I often spoke of “authority” in a similar vein – often referencing Bill (and Jim Boykin) – and recommending getting links from .gov or .edu sites and communities’ hubs because those confer trust (a notion very aligned with TrustRank).
- Bill Slawski (RIP) effectively reverse-engineered Google’s thinking through patents, identifying that Google sought a “trust score” to combat low-quality results. This was confirmed when Google’s Pandu Nayak later revealed the addition of an explicit quality/trust metric around 2011 to address content farm issues, hobo-web.co.uk. My own long-standing emphasis on site credibility, authoritative backlinks, and user trust anticipated Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) philosophy. In hindsight, this guidance some of us shared at the time to “be closer to trusted authorities” (both literally in link graphs and figuratively in reputation) was accurate enough. We (along with many others like Rand Fishkin at the time accurately predicted/documented that Google was integrating trust evaluations into ranking – something the DOJ trial exhibits and Google patents have since made evident.
PageRank’s Role Today
Even as Google’s algorithm has become vastly more complex, it still uses PageRank internally in 2025 – but as one factor among hundreds, and usually mediated through higher-level scores like Q*.
Google’s own public documents affirm this.
In a 2019 white paper on combating disinformation, Google noted that “the best known of these signals is PageRank, which uses links on the web to understand authoritativeness.” searchengineland.com
In other words, link-based authority (PageRank) remains a fundamental signal for evaluating a page’s trust and expertise.
Google’s search engineers continue to value the “distance from a known good source” that PageRank-style algorithms provide justice.gov.
However, they no longer rely on raw PageRank alone. As Google’s John Mueller explained, modern ranking is “not just PageRank of course…there are lots of different topics in there and PageRank is more or less a side comment.” searchengineland.com
PageRank has effectively been subsumed into composite metrics like quality score and into specific applications (e.g. identifying authoritative seed sites, boosting trusted domains, etc.).
In summary, PageRank’s evolution over two decades reflects Google’s shifting focus from quantity of links to quality of content and trust.
The original PageRank algorithm (circa 1998) introduced the paradigm of ranking by link popularity (with a damping factor ~0.85 to model random surfing) snap.stanford.edu.
TrustRank and related link-distance algorithms (mid-2000s) built on this by prioritising links from vetted “trusted” pages and demoting spam, under the principle that “good pages seldom link to bad ones.”patents.google.com
And in the 2010s, “QRank” or page quality scores further blended PageRank with numerous other signals to measure a page’s true authority and reliability, addressing content quality issues beyond links.
Today, Google’s ranking uses a sophisticated mix of these factors:
PageRank is still there under the hood, informing the algorithm about the link-based authority of pages justice.gov, but it operates in concert with semantic relevance models, machine learning systems (like RankBrain and BERT-based RankEmbed stradiji.com), user feedback metrics, and domain-level quality evaluations.
As a result, Google Search can surface results that are not only popular in the link graph, but also trusted, expert, and satisfying – fulfilling the original goal of PageRank (“bringing order to the web” by leveraging links snap.stanford.edu) while adapting to the modern web’s challenges.
Does Google Tell Us Our PageRank Score?
QUOTE: “Retiring the PageRank display from Toolbar helps avoid confusing users and webmasters about the significance of the metric.” John Mueller, Google, 2016
No.
What Was Toolbar Pagerank?
“The PageRank display from Toolbar” was known as Toolbar PR was a simplification of REAL Pagerank that was published for webmasters. In the latter years, a Toolbar PageRank score was unrelated to where you actually ranked (because of the quality metric Google added).
Toolbar PageRank, the public version of PageRank shown in browser toolbar plugins, has been completely phased out by Google.
How To Check Your Website’s Google PageRank
You can’t check your real Google PageRank (unless you work at Google).
QUOTE: “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-),” Susan Moskwa, Google, 2014
Will A Higher Google PageRank increase My Rankings?
Yes, but not necessarily.
Google has other quality algorithms that look at user experience, ad placement and website content quality scoring. All of these together determine where a page ranks, not just PageRank, although it was admitted in the DOJ trial that PR is still used.
Should I Nofollow External Links To Keep Google Pagerank?
QUOTE: “I’d recommend not using nofollow for kind of PageRank sculpting within a website because it probably doesn’t do what you think it does” John Mueller, Google 2017
No.
In any case, there’s a much better reward, in most cases, in linking out and building relationships with like-minded authors on other sites than to hoard Google PageRank.
Do not fear linking to trustworthy sites.
Your site is more valuable to Google and other search engines if you link out sensibly and editorially.
More importantly, it’s more valuable to other webmasters and ultimately to users.
When was the Last Google Toolbar PageRank update?
The Last Toolbar PageRank update was on 5/6 December 2013.
When will the next Google Toolbar PageRank Update happen?
It won’t.
The Last Toolbar Pagerank Update was 5/6 December 2013, and Google declared thereafter:
QUOTE: “PageRank is something that we haven’t updated for over a year now, and we’re probably not going to be updating it again gong forward, at least the Toolbar version.” John Mueller, Google 2014
True to their word, Google hasn’t updated Toolbar PageRank publicly since.
Key Take-aways
PageRank & Link-Based Authority: One of the oldest authority signals is Google’s famous PageRank algorithm, which treats links as “votes” of confidence.
Kim described PageRank as “a single signal relating to distance from a known good source” – essentially measuring how far removed a webpage is from trusted, reputable sites on the web justice.gov.
In the trial, he confirmed that Google “uses [PageRank] as an input to the Quality score.” justice.gov In practice, a page linked by many high-authority sites will inherit some authority itself.
This link-based authority is one component of the overall page quality/Q★ score. (For example, a university or government site linking to a page conveys a level of trustworthiness to that page.)
By feeding PageRank into the quality metric, Google combines traditional link popularity with other quality assessments to rank authoritative content higher.
Disclosure: Hobo Web uses generative AI when specifically writing about our own experiences, ideas, stories, concepts, tools, tool documentation or research. Our tool of choice is in this process is Google Gemini Pro 2.5 Deep Research. This assistance helps ensure our customers have clarity on everything we are involved with and what we stand for. It also ensures that when customers use Google Search to ask a question about Hobo Web software, the answer is always available to them, and it is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. All content was verified as correct by Shaun Anderson. See our AI policy.