Why Links Are Important to PageRank

LINKING remains at the very heart of Google ranking success for websites – and probably always will. If in any doubt about this statement, just read the following 'official' explanation of PageRank, the core website evaluation system of a company largely controlled by very serious, very intelligent, very private, very ambitious engineers who refuse to publicly comment on its machinations.

“The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University (which) relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value.

"In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important.

“Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search."

Search Engine Room: December 6, 2007