PageRank (PR) is used by web search engine Google in ranking individual web pages. However, it is known that this value is also easily manipulated by methods known as spoofing. Further, the calculation of PR will require iterative cycles of computations to achieve a “steady” value. This would mean that huge computation resources are required to obtain reasonably reliable PR values for various web pages. This invention provides relatively accurate and simple methods for ranking the importance of a node in a network. The web graph or the network is first represented by an incidence matrix or a representation matrix W. The matrix W is then self-multiplied to obtain flow matrix. The flow capacity, or the rank of each node, is then obtained from the flow matrix.