From Google’s founding to today, PageRank’s invention and evolution has profoundly influenced SEO. PageRank was founded on a very successful model used to rank scientific peer reviewed papers.
PageRank, the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was pivotal in Google’s ascent.
In the early days, from about 2000-2006 Google offered a toolbar showcasing an approximate PageRank score (1-10), dubbed “Toolbar PageRank” or “tbPR” colloquially.
Google later scrapped this feature due to an unhealthy fixation on backlinks – a global plague that ravaged SEOs, culminating in a massive site penalization circa 2011, with millions of sites being penalized – known as Manual Actions, for which the Disavow process was created.
This spawned the “toxic” backlinks myth, now largely debunked. Curiously, content creators perpetuate the notion that Google innately recognizes “quality” across diverse domains – law, psychology, medicine, even subjective areas like travel experiences. This premise is fundamentally flawed, fostering misconceptions about content quality versus PageRank in search rankings.
Notably, Google’s SEO Starter Guide still heralds PageRank as “fundamental”, uniquely emphasizing its significance among ranking factors.With PageRank data no longer public, SEO tools like SEMrush and Moz have attempted to reverse-engineer it, birthing metrics like Domain Authority (DA). These now widely inform backlink evaluation and keyword difficulty estimates, despite their limitations.
PageRank remains the most objective content evaluation method, rooted in scientific paper ranking models.
Subjective ranking inevitably introduces bias, a challenge mirrored in various human judgment spheres.Grasping PageRank mechanics remains crucial for effective SEO. While the landscape has shifted, PageRank’s core principles still underpin Google’s ranking methodology.Understanding this evolution from toolbar scores to modern interpretations is key for SEOs navigating the complex, ever-changing digital landscape. It underscores the enduring relevance of link-based algorithms in search engine optimization.
