PageRank is a method for ranking web pages based on the link structure of the web. It was developed by Google to help search engines make sense of the vast heterogeneity of the World Web. PageRank works by treating individual web pages as nodes and links between pages as edges, and recursively propagating importance weights through this link structure. It helps address issues like some pages having more backlinks but from less important places compared to pages with fewer but highly ranked backlinks. Dangling links that point to pages with no outgoing links are initially removed to avoid them forming rank sinks before final PageRank calculations are made.