Well, a big gear turned again today as Google recalculated their calculated PageRank values for just about every domain and page on the Internet. This is only the third PageRank refresh of 2009, and it’s likely to shake up the standings of every Google search.

How It Works

Rehashing my previous post, which pointed out the perils Google faces in a world full of real-time links and nofollow tags, PageRank is one of the cornerstones on which the search giant relies. Simply put, every page gets a rank on a scale of 0 to 10 based on the number and quality of links pointing to it. Google also seems to rank whole domains this way, using the domain’s rank to weight the scores of pages contained there. Top-ranked sites like Wikipedia (PR 8 ) show up much higher in the Google search results pages than lower-ranked ones like fosketts.net (PR 5).

It certainly surprised me to learn that PageRank isn’t continually updated. In fact, it’s only recalculated every few months! The January refresh bumped my blog from PR 4 to PR 5, driving literally 1,000 more daily visitors my way! The calculation must take some serious horsepower, too, since Google doesn’t include the latest pages. Today’s refresh appears to stop at content from May 6, suggesting that it took the big brains in Mountain View three full weeks to complete their computations!

What It Means

You should care about your sites’ PageRank if you’re at all interested in attracting visitors. As I mentioned, a single-digit PageRank bump drove thousands of visitors to my blog in January, prompting my curiosity about this critical number. I’m not obsessive about it, but it is interesting to watch how PageRank affects site referrals. This is especially important for new sites, like my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog or Gestalt IT, since their readership expands rapidly as PageRank climbs upward.

If you own a web site of blog, you might be interested in checking your own PageRank. One simple tool is a JavaScript bookmarklet like the one from Google Blogoscoped. Just navigate to a page and hit the bookmarklet to see a popup with that page’s PageRank.

If you use WordPress, you can add a plugin like SlaptiGooglePR, which displays the overall site PageRank in the Admin Dashboard. It also includes the PageRank of individual pages to the Posts and Pages lists (which is how I knew which days were included in the calculation!)

At the end of the day, PageRank isn’t the most critical part of the Internet. But like a self-winding automatic watch, it’s really interesting to learn how Google does what it does, returning relevant links as if by magic.

Are you enjoying these posts on the Internet and social networking? Let me know with a comment, tweet, or email! If you’re an RSS reader, you can filter which posts you will see by subscribing to one of my specialized feeds, as seen in the left column at blog.fosketts.net.

Update: Google again recalculated PageRank on June 24, incorporating pages through the middle of June 16. They’re getting faster!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Just Recalculated PageRank!
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Enterprise IT

• Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Reliance On Backup Tapes – What’s wrong with backup tapes? They’re inaccessible, making them unsuitable for most applications. My latest post for my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog.
• Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into Vista? – A group post for Gestalt IT suggesting that VMware’s tiered licensing strategy for the vSphere 4 family might cause anguish for customers
• Infosmack Episode 2 – EMC, David Donatelli and Non-Compete Agreements – I joined the StorageMonkeys Infosmack podcast to discuss EMC, Dave Donatelli, and con-compete agreements with Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley of 3Par and StorageRap, and Tony Asaro of the INI Group
• IT utilities, the biggest game in town – Chris Mellor of The Register suggests that the biggest IT vendors are positioning to lock up the IT market.
• The Non-Compete Clause Debate….. - Steve Duplessie muses on the pros and cons of non-compete agreements and what they mean for the IT industry
• Who’s the pot & who’s the kettle? - W. Curtis Preston reacts to the skirmishes between Tony Asaro and the EMC bloggers
• The Only VMware-certified NAS in its Category: Why the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200r Will Resonate with Small Businesses - Jerome Wendt expands on the Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200r
• Don’t focus too much on costs, cloud computing is about business agility - CapGemini reminds us that cloud computing isn’t just about reducing costs
• What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing - The Google Enterprise blog lays down some of the hard facts about building a cloud on your own
• Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System - Chris Evans provides one of the best reviews yet of Sun’s Amber Road open source-based storage systems
• Brocade Pokes Cisco in the Eye, Switches for IBM - A great headline and solid reporting by Om Malik on one of the first reactions to Cisco UCS
• TheInfoPro: Analysis or Marketing? - StorageMonkeys continues their probing of the storage analyst community
• A “Tweeterview” with Stephen Foskett, Nirvanix Consulting Director - Sunshine interviews me about Nirvanix, storage, and my new role

Apple

• Achieving Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail – A deep, long post on GMail, IMAP, Mac OS X Mail, and how to get all three to play nicely together.
• Monitor Your Mac Remotely With iStat for iPhone - I love iStat for Mac OS X and the iPhone and had been meaning to write a review. This AppleBlog post is just about what I might have written!

Life

• There Goes Chrysler – NPR’s awesome Planet Money blog reported the breaking news of Chrysler’s bankruptcy
• The Venture Capital Math Problem and The Venture Capital Math Problem (continued) – Fred Wilson points out that there can be no such thing as unlimited venture capital
• Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable? – Has pervasive wireless Ethernet made wired ports unnecessary?
• Interview with Micah Baldwin, Father of FollowFriday – Micah calls me out as someone who is doing interesting things on Twitter!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 2, 2009
This post was categorized as Everything. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Nirvanix management understands that enterprise IT is very different from other potential customers for cloud storage, so they’ve invested in services talent to help bridge the gap between the data center and the cloud. Part of the recent series-A2 round is going to fund the hiring of enterprise services folks, for example.

Nirvanix is also trying to engage with enterprise customers to move their businesses forward. With that in mind, I’m pleased to introduce my new blog at Nirvanix, Enterprise Storage Strategies! I’ve already launched the blog with two posts my Pack Rat readers might be interested in:

1. A Fork In the Road, where I talk about the impact of virtualization and cloud services on enterprise IT strategy
2. Doing More With Less, where I outline the budget pressures faced by IT groups and suggest a few ways to move forward

This blog is not a marketing or sales vehicle. Rather, it is an attempt to better understand and interact with the enterprise IT world and provide feedback between Nirvanix and its large corporate customers. If you’ve enjoyed reading my work for Storage Magazine, my seminars, and my posts here and at Gestalt IT, I think you’ll benefit from this new blog as well. I’ll occasionally post summaries here to my work on other blogs, but if you want to keep up to date I urge you to subscribe via RSS or follow via Twitter or FriendFeed.

So now I’ve got three blogs with three distinct characters:

My friend Sunshine says it’s all so confusing with multiple blogs, and she’s right. I welcome your suggestions on how to keep this all straight! Should I cross-post? Link to each post? Occasionally post a digest of links? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Introducing the Enterprise Storage Strategies Blog
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.