Evaluating the importance of nodes for complex networks is of great significance to the research of survivability and robusticity of networks. This paper proposes an effective ranking method based on degree value and the importance of lines. It can well identify the importance of bridge nodes with lower computational complexity. Firstly, the properties of nodes that are connected to a line are used to compute the importance of the line. Then, the contribution of nodes to the importance of lines is calculated. Finally, degree of nodes and the contribution of nodes to the importance of lines are considered to rank the importance of nodes. Five real networks are used as test data. The experimental results show that our method can effectively evaluate the importance of nodes for complex networks. •A Node Importance ranking method (DIL) is proposed based on local information.•The importance of line is considered to evaluate the importance of node.•DIL can well identify the importance of nodes especially the bridge nodes.•DIL can be used in large-scale networks with lower computational complexity.