For several months, my hardly-ever-used iSchool Blog has been the very first result of a Google search for "ischool blog." This has baffled me since I first noticed it while I was searching for the enigmatic UC Berkeley School of Information Blog. I rarely post anything to my iSchool blog, except for the occasional school essay, so it's not like the content is being updated in a timely manner. What is even more interesting in terms of an extremely high Google page rank having the top listing (thanks Nick!) is that nothing links back to my blog except my own pages. The Pagerank algorithm is influenced by popular sites linking to others... and yet, my blog has no incoming links.

I thought that perhaps my site's ranking was being influenced by the blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu domain as a whole... but, well, nobody is linking to blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu. Why would they? So, is it possible that simple links back to myself are inflating my pagerank?

In any case, I just recently changed the title of my iSchool Blog to "Michael Manoochehri's I School Blog," because my last name is way more fun than my first name. Will this have any effect on the result rankings? We shall see!