When and why Google PageRank was discontinued

[Dimaeiya333]

In 2005, when Google gave Stanford University 1.8 million of its shares in exchange for ownership of the PageRank patent, it seemed the company had big plans for the algorithm and might be planning to keep it indefinitely.

However, according to recent revelations by a former Googler, the company proceeded to abandon the original PageRank the following year. It was replaced by an algorithm that works on the same principles, but with a faster calculation and is less vulnerable to manipulation.

Support for Google's original PageRank didn't stop immediately, however. Updates continued until 2013, just as Google Penguin arrived to bolster the search engine's efforts in the link war.

Then, in 2016, just as Penguin was finally being introduced into Google’s core ranking algorithm, the famous PageRank toolbar was removed along with its reporting. This meant that webmasters could no longer monitor their PageRank scores.

But the drama didn't end there. The final surprise for many was the expiration of the original PageRank patent in 2019.

That was the final nail in the coffin and confirmation that we will not be returning to Google's original PageRank algorithm. The future now lies in the new version of PageRank, which works closely with Penguin to qualitatively analyse and rank all types of links.

How does PageRank work?


Although Google's PageRank algorithm has been updated multiple times over the years, its underlying principle remains the same: that a site's backlink profile is a reliable indicator of its relative authority on a given topic.

The original version of PageRank initially determined the importance of web pages based on the number of links. Sergey Brin and Larry Page built it to crawl the web, compile a log of all the links, and then calculate the total volume of links pointing to each target domain.

Google's PageRank algorithm then compared the results of all the websites and assigned each a PageRank score that reflected its relative performance on a particular topic.

The score itself was presented as a value between zero and ten: the weakest backlink profile received the lowest score, while high PR scores were reserved for web pages that had the strongest backlink profile.

So, in simple terms, the more links you had from your competitors, the higher PR score you would get and the more credible you would appear on the topic at hand. Ultimately, this translated into a favorable ranking in the SERPs.

Over time, however, Google evolved and adopted a slightly different approach. The original PageRank algorithm was abandoned and a new system was introduced that took into account more than just link volume.

Google's PageRank algorithm now takes into account both the quantity and quality of links. Instead of blindly treating all links as equal, the value of each backlink is analyzed separately.

That said, the technical term for this value is “link juice” or “link equity.” It can be thought of as an indicator of the level of influence an incoming link has on the ranking.

Basically, each instance of a dofollow link is considered an endorsement that passes authority from the referring domain to the target domain. This flow of authority between the linked web pages is what we call “link juice.”

And to determine the value of the resulting link, Google PageRank calculates the amount of authority passed to the target page based on several parameters.

To start, it takes into account the relative authorities of the referring and target domains. The most impactful backlinks are high-quality ones that pass on the link juice of high-authority domains.

Take a site like Wikipedia for example. Since it ranks 11th on Alexa, each hospital mailing address list inbound link you get from your articles is worth far more than the combined referrals from hundreds of average sites.

So, if you intend to dramatically improve your page's PageRank scores and search rankings, you may want to prioritize high authority sites.

Apart from this, another factor that potentially influences the value and quality of the link is the number of external links from the referring page.

The higher the number of backlinks from a referring domain, the lower the link juice each of them will pass to the target domain. This is because authority is evenly distributed across all outbound links.

A referring domain with a PageRank of 6, for example, would end up passing a PR of 2 through each of its 3 outbound links.

Page rank how to calculate