Arnett - 5:18 pm on Oct 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

The slowness to re-index modified PR= or >4 inner pages suggests to me backlinks/PR must be well out of date.

That is my point exactly. I went through the backlinks for a top rated site. Clicking on the backlinks yielded several 404 not founds. That seems to be telling me that the backlinks themselves are not current and was the reason for my original post.