What is PageRank?

The idea in plain terms

Imagine someone browsing at random, clicking links from page to page and now and then jumping to a random page instead. PageRank is, roughly, the probability that this random surfer is on a given page at any moment. Pages that many paths lead to get visited more, so they score higher.

Three rules follow from the model:

1. A page shares its score among the links on it. A link from a page with five outgoing links passes more than a link from an equal page with five hundred.
2. Importance is recursive. A link from an important page is worth more than a link from an obscure one.
3. A damping factor represents the chance that the surfer keeps clicking and does not jump away. The original paper used 0.85, so a little value is lost at every step.

A tiny example. Pages A and B both link only to C, and C links only to A:

A → C
B → C
C → A

C receives two links and scores highest. A scores well because its one link comes from C, the strongest page. B has no inbound links and keeps only the baseline score.

What changed since the original

• The visible score is gone. Google used to show a 0 to 10 PageRank value in a browser toolbar. It stopped updating it and then removed it. Any "PageRank checker" today displays something else.
• Not all links are equal any more. Google patents describe models in which a link's weight depends on how likely it is to be clicked, so a prominent link in the main content may count for more than one in a footer.
• Some links pass nothing. Links marked nofollow, sponsored or ugc are treated as hints that Google generally does not count; see nofollow. Links that Google's spam systems judge to be manipulative are ignored.
• It is one input. Google's guide to its ranking systems lists PageRank alongside systems for relevance, quality, freshness and more. A page with few links can outrank a heavily linked one when it answers the query better.

Authority scores from SEO tools

Since Google publishes nothing, SEO software companies calculate their own link-based scores, usually on a 0 to 100 scale. They are built on each company's own crawl of the web and its own formula. They are useful for comparing sites within one tool. They are not PageRank, Google does not use them, and a rising score is not in itself a ranking improvement.

What PageRank means for your own site

The part you control most is internal. Links between your own pages move PageRank around the site just as external links bring it in.

• Pages linked from the homepage and main navigation receive the most. If an important page is four clicks deep and linked once, it gets little.
• Orphan pages receive none from inside the site.
• Every link on a page takes a share. A page stuffed with hundreds of links passes little through each.
• Redirect chains and broken links waste it. Point links at final URLs.
• Internal nofollow does not "sculpt" PageRank. The share assigned to a nofollowed link is not handed to the remaining links. It is simply not passed.

A practical application: find your pages with the most external links, and make sure they link to the pages you most want to rank. That is the logic behind pillar pages and our internal linking strategy.

In WordPress

WordPress has no PageRank concept, but its structure shapes the flow: menus, category archives, related-post blocks and breadcrumbs are all internal links. Hydrogen SEO's internal link counter shows how many internal links point to and from each post and filters for orphaned content, and the pillar content flag highlights key pages that are under-linked. Those two views are the closest practical stand-in for seeing where link value pools and where it never arrives.