Google PageRank (PR) was a ranking algorithm used by Google to rank websites in its search engine results. It was introduced in the late 1990s and was one of the factors used by Google to determine the relevance and importance of a website.
The basic idea behind PageRank was to measure the quality and quantity of links pointing to a website, with the assumption that a website with many high-quality links would be more valuable and relevant than a website with few or low-quality links. The PageRank algorithm used a complex mathematical formula to evaluate the value of each link, and to assign a PageRank score to each website. The score would then be used to determine the website's ranking in the search results.
PageRank took into account several factors, including:
- The number of links pointing to a website.
- The quality of the links pointing to a website.
- The relevance of the linking website's content to the linked website's content.
- The presence of the linked website's link on the linking website's home page.
However, Google has not updated PageRank since 2013 and it is no longer publicly available. Instead, Google uses a number of other ranking factors, such as content relevance, user engagement, and backlinks, to determine the relevance and importance of a website in its search results.
In conclusion, Google PageRank was an important part of the early search engine algorithms, but it has since been replaced by more complex and sophisticated ranking algorithms.