Google’s Analysis of Network Structure to Determine Page Quality
https://www.sitepoint.com/link-juice-improving-google-ranking-with-links/
This post is targeted at people who manage websites, and is giving advice on how to improve the ranking of a website in Google’s search rankings. It explains the importance of seeking inbound links from other reputable websites to make Google think that you are a high quality website. This article simplifies Google’s algorithm through the analogy of each page having a certain amount of endorsement to give which they call “link juice”. This “link juice” is then divided up up between all of the external links on the page and improves the pagerank of all of those pages. Finally this article gives advice to webmasters on techniques to do this such as reaching out to other webmasters for links, linking internally on your site, and creating content that will earn more links.
What Google is trying to do through their pagerank algorithm is determine the nodes that are well connected in the internet network. Google assumes that if there is a well-connected page on the internet that is linked to by many other well connected pages then it is more likely to have valuable content than a page that no one links to. This is Google’s way of analyzing the structure of the internet network and determining which nodes occupy the most powerful position in it.