The Gallon of Water Link Theory

It doesn’t matter how many cups you share it between, it’s still a gallon. I’m often asked how PageRank is passed from a page to the pages to which it links. Sometimes I try to explain it using the gallon of water theory. Your web page has a specific amount of PageRank. Let’s call it, you guessed it, one gallon. Each outgoing link you have on the page is a cup. These cups can be all different sizes, but the rule is you must put an equal amount of water into each cup. So, if you have five outgoing links, each cup gets 1/5th of a gallon of water. if you have 30 outgoing links, each one gets 1/30th of a gallon of water. This, in a nutshell, is how you distribute PageRank, or receive PageRank if you’re the holder of cup.