Google’s PageRank (named after Larry Page), or the heart of their software as Google describes it, is a system of counting link votes and determining which
pages are most important based on them. These scores are then used along with
many other things to determine if a page will rank well in a search.
The PageRank updates scheduled for this year:
1st Update: January 28 to February 6- 2nd Update: June 27 to July 7
- 3rd Update: September 29 to 4 October
- 4th Update: 24 December to 29 December
However, Google also relies on other strategies such as Google Panda (released in February 2011) which is a change that aims to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. CNET reported a surge in the rankings of news websites and social networking sites, and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising.