An update on the PageRank patent

[rochon.a1.119]

As a result of this, SEOs began to focus solely on increasing PageRank as a metric to improve rankings. This was largely driven by a simplified understanding of the algorithm, which suggested that a page with the highest number of links should have the highest score.

A simple explanation of the approach of many in the early 2000s was that their goal was to get as many links as possible from web pages with the highest PageRank possible.

This led, as expected, to PageRank being manipulated: with money in exchange for links and with the link farms that many SEO professionals remember.

Then, 15 years later, Google would stop updating this public toolbar in 2014 (with the last confirmed update in December 2013) and retire it entirely in 2016. However, this didn't kazakhstan mobile database mean that Google stopped using PageRank as part of its algorithm, it just stopped being a public-facing metric.


The original PageRank patent from 1998 expired in 2018 and, to the surprise of many, was not renewed. Around that time, a Google training employee confirmed that the original algorithm had not been used since 2006.

But that doesn't mean PageRank is dead, far from it.

The original patent has been superseded by this new one . To fully understand the differences with the original, we recommend reading Bill Slawski's analysis here .

This new patent refers to "seed sites in trusted seed sets" and defines them as "...specially selected high-quality pages that provide good web connectivity to other sites that are not seed pages," with two examples given being the Google Directory (still online when the patent was filed) and the New York Times.

"[Seed sites] should be trustworthy, diverse enough to cover a wide range of fields of public interest, and well connected to other sites. They should have a large number of useful outbound links to facilitate the identification of other useful, high-quality pages, acting as "hubs" on the web.