The verdict
PageRank was Google’s first ranking system, and Google’s own documentation still lists it as part of core ranking. The idea is simple: a page passes value through its links, shared among them. That is why an orphan page gets nothing, why a forty-link footer votes for everything at once, and why the hub posts on this site link out sparingly.
Clients sometimes tell me PageRank is dead. What died was the little green bar in a browser toolbar that showed a score out of ten. The system behind it did not go anywhere.
What Google says
Google’s guide to its ranking systems, updated in December 2025, puts it plainly: PageRank is “one of our core ranking systems used when Google first launched”, and “How PageRank works has evolved a lot since then, and it continues to be part of our core ranking systems.”
It started as a research project. Larry Page and Sergey Brin described it at Stanford in 1998, in the paper that introduced Google, as a way to rank pages by the links pointing at them rather than by the words on them alone.
The idea in one paragraph
A page has some amount of value. It passes that value on through its links, and the share each link carries gets smaller as the number of links grows. A page that nothing links to receives nothing. A page linked from many valuable pages receives a lot. Everything else is detail, and Google has changed the detail many times. The shape has held.
What it explains in an audit
- Orphan pages get nothing. A classic car marketplace I audited had 8,317 pages that nothing on the site linked to, out of about 9,220 indexed. Those pages were not being judged and found wanting. Most of them were never reached.
- Site-wide links vote for everything at once. A footer with thirty links is on every page, so every page splits part of its value thirty ways, including to the privacy policy. If four of those links matter, the other twenty-six are diluting them.
- Two links to one page and none to three others is a decision. Usually nobody made it on purpose. A home page assembled from blocks over two years argues hard for one service and stays silent about the rest.
- Nofollow does not redirect value inward. It has not since 2009. A nofollowed link still takes its share. The share is simply discarded.
For a sense of scale, HTTP Archive’s 2024 Web Almanac found the median page carried 41 internal links, and 129 on the top thousand sites. Large sites link far more, and they have more pages to link to. The ratio matters less than where the links go.
How I apply it on this site
The supporting posts here link up to a main post, and each main post links to a service page. The main posts deliberately do not link down to every supporting post. Each extra link on a main post would take a share of what it passes to the service page, and the service page is the one that needs it.
That is PageRank used as a design rule rather than a metric, and it is the most useful way to use it. Nobody outside Google can see the number. Everybody can see where their links point.
What it does not mean
It does not mean more links always win. Ahrefs studied 44,589 keywords and found the traffic of the linking pages correlated with rankings better than their count. A link from a page people actually visit is worth more than ten from pages nobody reads, which is roughly what the original idea would predict.
The trial and the leak confirmed that clicks matter too, alongside links rather than instead of them. That is in what the antitrust trial and the leak put on the record about ranking.
The short version
- PageRank is still part of core ranking. Google’s own documentation says so.
- Value is shared across a page’s links. More links, smaller shares.
- Orphans get nothing. 8,317 of 9,220 pages on one site.
- Site-wide links dilute. A thirty-link footer votes for all thirty.
- Nofollow discards, it does not redirect.
- Use it as a design rule. Decide where links point, then keep the important pages lean.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO consulting covers questions like how a site’s links should be arranged, and contextual internal linking is where that gets applied across a whole site.
