Everything You Need to Know About Google PageRank

Step back in time, and Google PageRank was the SEO metric that everyone talked about.

An increase in your PageRank score was a great demonstrator that your SEO strategy (and, in particular, your link building strategy) was working.

Fast forward to today, and PageRank is rarely mentioned.

Not because it’s no longer important. But because it’s no longer a public-facing metric.

In this guide, we’ll dive deep into everything you still need to know about the Google PageRank algorithm.

PageRank is an algorithm that measures the importance of webpages based on the links pointing to them.

The basic idea is that authoritative pages get more links. So pages with more links should rank higher in search results.

Especially if those links come from popular pages (i.e., pages that have high PageRank scores themselves).

Previously, SEOs could see the PageRank score of any webpage via the Google Toolbar.

A PageRank score of 0 (PR0) represented the lowest-quality pages. While a page score of 10 (PR10) represented the most authoritative pages.

However, PageRank works on a logarithmic scale. Not a linear scale.

Many SEOs believe that it has a logarithmic base of five. Meaning each incremental increase represents a fivefold increase in importance.

In this case, a PR4 page would be considered 25 times more important than a PR2 page.

(Not twice as important, as a linear scale suggests.)

The reason why SEOs became so fixated on this metric is that PageRank passes from one page to another....