PageRank is the all-important (or at least it was the all-important) ranking mechanism for bloggers and website owners. Having a high pagerank meant a life of relative ease and riches while having a low pagerank of 1 or 2 meant a life of shoveling coal in an unsafe mine. Or something like that.

Nevertheless, understanding pagerank has never been an easy endeavor, but this post lays out some nice fundamentals:

Put another way, the more links to a page, the more ‘votes’ it gets and the higher its PageRank. Adding more complexity to that idea, the votes are weighted by the PageRank of each linking page and tempered by the amount of links that referring page has.

As Si Fiskin expertly points out, there were some critical limitations to this early PageRank model. The final equation documented in the research paper includes adjustments to correct the limitations, as you will understand by reading this post. Let me warn you that this post gets quite mathematical. Brace yourself!

SEOmoz - Two Important Adjustments to the Early PageRank Model