Backlink
A hyperlink from one website to another, historically the strongest external signal search engines use to judge a page's importance and…
LinksPR
PageRank
Google's original link-analysis algorithm, which scores a page's importance by the number and importance of pages linking to it, computed recursively.
In full
PageRank models a random surfer following links, with a damping factor representing the chance of jumping to a random page. Its output was published as a 0-10 toolbar value until Google stopped updating it in 2013 and removed it entirely in 2016. Google has confirmed that PageRank in some form remains part of its ranking systems; every third-party 'authority' metric is an independent approximation, not the real thing.
Example
A page linked from three high-authority sources outranks one linked from thirty low-quality directories.
Related terms
Link equity
The ranking value passed through a hyperlink, influenced by the linking page's own authority, its relevance, its number of outbound links…
Third-party authority metrics
Vendor-calculated 0-100 scores estimating a domain's link strength — Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, Semrush Authority Score, Majestic Trust Flow —…
Internal linking
Links between pages on the same site, which control crawl paths, distribute link equity, and communicate topical relationships and page…
Link graph
The network of all pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges, over which link-based ranking algorithms such as PageRank are computed.
Where to read more
- Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment (HITS) · Landmark Post · cs.cornell.edu
- Introduction to Information Retrieval · Book · nlp.stanford.edu
- The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine · Landmark Post · infolab.stanford.edu
- US 6,285,999 — Method for Node Ranking in a Linked Database (PageRank) · Patent · freepatentsonline.com