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What Is PageRank?
PageRank is the algorithm employed by the Google search engine, originally developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

It is based on the premise, long prevalent in the offline world of academia, that the importance of a research paper can be judged by the number of citations the paper has from other research papers. The content of bibliography or reference page at the back of a paper/theses is considered as a printed 'outbound link' to other scientific works.

Brin and Page have simply transferred this premise to its web equivalent: the importance of a web page can be judged by the number of hyperlinks pointing to it from other web pages.

It may look complex and daunting to non-mathematicians, but the PageRank algorithm is in fact elegantly simple and straightforward. The PageRank of a web page is calculated as a sum of the PageRanks of all pages linking to it (its incoming links), divided by the number of links on each of those pages (its outgoing links).
From a search engine marketer's point of view, this means there are two ways in which PageRank can affect the position of your page on Google:

The number of incoming links. Obviously the more of these, the better. But there is another thing the algorithm tells us: no incoming link can have a negative effect on the PageRank of the page it points at. At worst, it can simply have no effect at all.

The number of outgoing links on the page that points to your page. The fewer of these, the better. This is interesting: it means given two pages of equal PageRank linking to you, one with 5 outgoing links and the other with 10, you will get twice the increase in PageRank from the page with only 5 outgoing links.

At this point, we take a step back and ask ourselves just how important PageRank is to the position of your page in the Google search results.

The next thing we can observe about the PageRank algorithm is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with relevance to the search terms queried. It is simply one single (admittedly important) part of the entire Google relevance ranking algorithm.

Perhaps a good way to look at PageRank is as a multiplying factor, applied to the Google search results after all its other computations have been completed. The Google algorithm first calculates the relevance of pages in its index to the search terms, and then multiplies this relevance by the PageRank to produce a final list. The higher your PageRank, therefore, the higher up the results you will be, but there are still many other factors related to the positioning of words on the page that must be considered first.

Learn more about this author, Yudi Yuviama.
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