Does Google still use PageRank?

Yes. Google's ranking systems guide lists link analysis systems and PageRank, and says PageRank has evolved a great deal since the original paper. A 2025 court exhibit describes it as an input to Google's quality score.

Can I check the PageRank of my site?

No. The public Toolbar PageRank score is reported to have been removed in 2016. Domain Rating, Domain Authority and similar scores are estimates made by tool vendors from their own crawls. None of them is PageRank.

What is the damping factor in PageRank?

It is the chance that the imaginary surfer keeps clicking links instead of jumping to a random page. Brin and Page wrote in 1998 that they usually set it to 0.85.

Do nofollow links pass PageRank?

A nofollow link is a request not to pass it. Matt Cutts of Google wrote in June 2009 that a nofollowed link still uses up its share of the page's PageRank. Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint, so it may choose to count a link.

Is PageRank the same as Domain Authority?

No. PageRank is Google's internal signal. Domain Authority is a Moz metric and Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric. Google has denied using Domain Authority.

PageRank explained: does Google still use it?

PageRank is the system Google was founded on. It scores a page by the links that point to it, and it treats a link from a well-linked page as worth more than a link from an obscure one. Google still uses it. The public score disappeared years ago, and the version running today is described differently from the 1998 original, but links still feed a PageRank signal inside Google’s ranking systems.

The original idea

Sergey Brin and Larry Page described PageRank in their 1998 paper on the Google prototype, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”. They explained it with a thought experiment. Imagine a “random surfer” who starts on a random page and keeps clicking links, never going back, until they get bored and start again on another random page. The probability that the surfer visits a page is that page’s PageRank.

Two consequences follow, and both still shape how people think about links.

A page shares its score among its links. The paper says the score is normalised by the number of links on the page. A page with ten outgoing links gives each a smaller share than a page with two.
Scores pass along chains. A page is strong if strong pages link to it, and those pages are strong for the same reason.

The paper also includes a damping factor, the chance that the surfer keeps clicking instead of jumping away. The authors wrote that they usually set it to 0.85.

The formula in plain words

The 1998 paper gives this formula for a page A that is linked from pages T1 to Tn:

PR(A) = (1 - d) + d × (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Here d is the damping factor and C(T) is the number of links going out of page T. In words: take each page that links to A, divide its PageRank by the number of links it has, add those shares together, and scale the total by the damping factor.

A simple case shows the effect. Suppose two pages link to you, and both have the same score. One has 5 outgoing links and the other has 50. The first passes you one fifth of its score. The second passes you one fiftieth. That is the origin of the advice to prefer pages that link out sparingly, and of the idea of link equity.

The same paper introduced a second use of links. It says anchors “often provide more accurate descriptions of Web pages than the pages themselves”. That is why anchor text became a ranking signal alongside PageRank.

What happened to the public score

For years Google showed a 0 to 10 PageRank score in its browser toolbar. An industry grew up around it, including the sale of links priced by the score of the page. The public score is reported to have stopped updating in 2013 and to have been removed in 2016.

Since then, nobody outside Google can see a page’s PageRank. The scores in SEO tools, such as Domain Rating, URL Rating and Domain Authority, are each vendor’s own estimate built on its own crawl. They borrow the idea, and none of them is a Google number. Domain Authority vs Domain Rating explains what each one measures.

The evidence that Google still uses it

Three sources agree.

Google’s documentation. The ranking systems guide, last updated in December 2025, lists “Link analysis systems and PageRank”. It says Google has various systems that understand how pages link to each other, that PageRank is one of the core systems used since Google launched, and that it has evolved a great deal since the original paper.

Court evidence. A Google engineer interview, published as an exhibit in the remedies phase of the US antitrust case and reported in May 2025, says: “PageRank. This is a single signal relating to distance from a known good source, and it is used as an input to the Quality score.”

The 2024 leak. The internal documentation that leaked in May 2024 contains several PageRank fields, according to iPullRank’s analysis. They include one whose name analysts read as “nearest seeds”, older variants marked as deprecated, a toolbar PageRank field, and a field described as the PageRank of the site’s homepage, attached to every page. The leak lists fields. It does not show weights or prove that a field is in use. Our lesson on the leak and court documents covers the limits.

How today’s PageRank differs

	1998 PageRank	What is known today
Core idea	Probability that a random surfer lands on the page	Distance from a known good source, per the 2025 court exhibit
Starting point	Every page counts as a possible start	Known good sources, per the same exhibit. Which sources those are is not public
Public score	Toolbar score from 0 to 10	None
Role in ranking	The main quality measure	One input to a quality score that is described as largely the same across queries
Nofollow links	The attribute did not exist until 2005	A nofollowed link still uses up its share, per Matt Cutts in 2009. Since 2019 nofollow is a hint

The seed idea matters in practice. If the signal measures how close a page is to trusted sources, then a link that sits one or two steps from well-established sites is worth more than a link deep inside a cluster of sites that only link to each other. Lists of “seed sites” that circulate online are guesses.

The court exhibit also places PageRank on the quality side of ranking, not the relevance side. Relevance to a query comes from anchors, page text and clicks. PageRank contributes to whether the site is trusted at all. How search engines evaluate links sets out both sides.

What changed with nofollow

The 1998 model has every link passing a share. In June 2009, Google’s Matt Cutts explained a change. If a page has ten links and five are nofollowed, the five normal links each pass a tenth of the page’s PageRank, not a fifth. The share of the nofollowed links is not handed to the others. That ended the practice of “PageRank sculpting”, where site owners nofollowed some links to push more value through the rest. Link attributes covers how nofollow, sponsored and ugc work now.

What this means for your links

Chase the source, not a score. A tool’s authority score is an estimate. Whether real, trusted sites link to the page that links to you is closer to what PageRank measures.
Expect each extra link from the same site to add less. The model rewards new sources.
Look at the linking page. A page with hundreds of outgoing links divides whatever it has between all of them.
Do not expect PageRank alone to rank a page. Google’s Gary Illyes said in April 2024 that Google needs “very few links” to rank pages. Do backlinks still matter puts the signal in proportion.

Links that journalists and editors give freely tend to come from the well-connected sites this model favours, which is one reason digital PR is rated so highly.

Where to go next

The next lesson covers how value moves through redirects and internal links. To compare the tools that estimate link strength, see backlink analysis tools. Definitions are in the glossary.