PageRank is a piece of SEO history that still shapes how search works today, and understanding it helps explain why backlinks matter so much in the first place. It was the original idea that made Google Google, and while the term is often thrown around loosely and sometimes confused with other things, the concept behind it is genuinely illuminating.
Here is what PageRank is, where it came from, and why it still matters even though you will never see a PageRank number today.
The straightforward definition
PageRank is a method, originally developed by Google’s founders, for judging the importance of a webpage based on the links pointing to it. In essence, it treats a link from one page to another as a vote of confidence, and it judges a page as more important the more, and the more important, the pages that link to it.
The clever twist, and the reason it worked so well, is that not all votes count equally. A link from an important, well-regarded page counts for more than a link from an obscure, unimportant one. So a page becomes important partly by being linked to by other important pages, in a sort of cascading system of credibility. Importance flows through links, and a vote from a trusted source carries more weight than a vote from an unknown one.
The name is a small in-joke, referring both to web pages and to Larry Page, one of Google’s founders who co-created it.
Why it changed everything
To appreciate PageRank, it helps to understand what search was like before it. Early search engines largely judged pages by the words on them, which was easy to manipulate. Anyone could stuff a page with popular terms to appear relevant, regardless of whether the page was any good, and results were often poor and easily gamed.
PageRank introduced a powerful new idea: judging a page not only by what it said about itself, but by what the rest of the web said about it, through links. Because links from other sites were much harder to fake at scale than words on your own page, this produced dramatically better, more trustworthy results. A page that many credible sites linked to was probably genuinely useful, in a way that on-page words alone could never prove.
This insight was the foundation of Google’s success. It is why Google’s results were so much better than its rivals’ in the early days, and it established the principle, still central today, that links act as signals of credibility and importance.
Why it still matters, even invisibly
Here is a point that causes confusion, so it is worth being clear. For many years, Google publicly showed a PageRank score for pages, a number from 0 to 10, and people obsessed over it. Google stopped showing that public score long ago, so you can no longer look up a page’s PageRank, and the visible number is a thing of the past.
But this does not mean PageRank disappeared. The underlying principle, that links act as votes of confidence and that links from important sources carry more weight, remains a core part of how Google works. The public number is gone; the idea behind it lives on inside Google’s vastly more sophisticated modern systems. Search today involves an enormous number of factors far beyond PageRank, but the fundamental notion that credible links signal importance still runs through it all.
This is why, throughout this glossary, backlinks and referring domains are described as votes of confidence and treated as valuable. That framing comes directly from the logic of PageRank. Understanding PageRank is really understanding why links matter at all.
The lesson it teaches
PageRank carries an important and reassuring lesson about how to earn credibility online. Because it rewards links from genuine, important, credible sources, and because Google has grown ever better at distinguishing genuine links from manipulative ones, the honest path has always been the durable one: earn links by being genuinely worth linking to.
This is also why the manipulative shortcuts warned about elsewhere in this glossary, such as buying large numbers of low-quality links, tend to fail or backfire. They are attempts to fake the votes of confidence that PageRank was designed to measure, and Google has spent decades getting better at spotting exactly that. The spirit of PageRank rewards genuine credibility, not manufactured signals.
Why it matters for your business
Understanding PageRank helps you grasp the “why” behind so much SEO advice. It explains why backlinks from credible, relevant sources are valuable, why the number and quality of referring domains matters, why buying cheap links is a bad idea, and why the honest route of earning genuine mentions is the one that lasts. Rather than treating these as arbitrary rules, you can see them as flowing from a single sensible principle: the web’s opinion of you, expressed through credible links, is a powerful signal of your importance.
It also helps you keep perspective. Since the public PageRank number is long gone, anyone still talking about boosting your “PageRank score” as if it were a visible metric is out of date. The principle matters; the old number does not.
What a business owner should actually do about it
You do not need to do anything with PageRank directly, but you can let its lesson guide your approach to building credibility online. Focus on earning genuine links from relevant, credible sources by being a business worth referencing, doing good work, creating genuinely useful content, and building real relationships and reputation over time. That is exactly what the logic of PageRank rewards, and always has.
Equally, treat with caution anyone offering to game links or boost outdated scores, because that runs against the very grain of how search is designed to work. The honest, patient path of earning credibility is not only the safe one, it is the one the whole system was built to reward.
PageRank is a reminder that, at its heart, search has always tried to measure genuine credibility. Earning that credibility honestly, rather than trying to fake it, is exactly the kind of principled, long-term thinking that stands the test of time as tricks and shortcuts come and go.
