The Google PageRank metric was named after co-founder Larry Page and was initially developed by the search engine to assign a numerical weight to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents to determine relative importance within the set. He had envisioned the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want,” and PageRank was initially a major part of that vision.

PageRank Today

Today, however, Google uses more than 200 signals alongside PageRank to order websites, and these algorithims are updated on a weekly basis. These signals may include a variety of impact factors including the ways in which you feature key words, be it in header tags, within the body, their proximity, and more, or your page’s social proximity to a user based on their past interactions with the website and other social networks linked to it.

In fact, in the past Google has updated PageRank across the Internet only a few times per year. Sometimes, it’s even been as long as 11 months between updates. Although initially updated every month, these updates have been very sporadic in recent memory. Although PageRank updates have very recently been found on June 27, July 18, and now August 4, 2011, it is important to continue considering PageRank amongst many hundreds of additional factors as the two authorities below and many hundreds of others have further explained.

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