PageRank is Alive and Well: Google's Latest Patent proves it

PageRank has been seen as an old school term by new SEOs because many believed it was retired when proof of it disappeared from the Google Toolbar officially in April 2016. However, if you just took the 2018 SEO Basic Course then you know from John Heard that, although it's not available for public viewing, PageRank is still alive and well internally at Google

To quickly explain it, PageRank is one of the ways that Google assigns authority to individual web pages. With a ranking system from zero to ten - the higher the PageRank (PR) the better. A few years back Google's toolbar was an easy way to quickly see the quality of a page and as you can image was a top tool for link building. For example, a link from a PR6 site was far more valuable than four links from a PR3 site. This slide from the SEO Basic course solidly explains the complex ranking system.

So, why are we talking about PageRank? It's suddenly back on the everyone's radar because Bill Slawski, who is known for his brilliant interpretations of Google Patents, just reported on an update to Google's original PageRank Patent that was granted on April 24th. Or as he put it...

A continuation patent of an updated PageRank was granted today. The original patent was filed in 2006, and reminded me a lot of Yahoo’s Trustrank (which is cited by the patent’s applicants as one of a large number of documents that this new version of the patent is based upon.)

So what's changed? Well, the patent goes into detail on how pages are ranked based on how close they are to high quality seed sites that will be used as reference in Google's link graph. The distance is measured in a complicated way that has everything to do with links. The simplified version is that the Internet is now separated into topics/industries and the closer a site is linked to the Google recognized high quality and spam free seed sites in their industry then the higher a site will rank.

That means that smaller sites with less links have the same chances of ranking highly as larger sites with tons of links. If that smaller...