A method and system for determining temporal importance of documents having links between documents based on a temporal analysis of the links is provided. A temporal ranking system collects link information or snapshots indicating the links between documents at various snapshot times. The temporal ranking system calculates a current temporal importance of a document by factoring in the current importance of the document derived from the current snapshot (i.e., with the latest snapshot time) and the historical importance of the document derived from the past snapshots. To calculate the current temporal importance of a web page, the temporal ranking system aggregates the importance of the web page for each snapshot.