Marcia - 8:01 am on Oct 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

It may be change in the algorithm. It looks reasonable that a collection of good relevant outbound links should have some authority, i.e. a little PR.

No, PR is based on inbound links, the PR of a page is not affected at all by outbound links.

After all, PR algorithm was a student work of Google founders and they may change it easily and without a warning.

The PR algo is a patented work. It was granted a patent by the U.S. Patent Office, and the patent itself is in the name of Stanford University.

It would seem there is a time factor, a puzzling one. I've got sites only a couple of months old showing PR on all pages, and pages on an older site that were added and cached with an Aug. 21 date that I put on the pages have PR showing - but for an older established site with a mediocre PR5 that got a PR7 and a PR6 link around the same time those new sites' pages went up, if not before, PR hasn't changed a bit.

Question, though: if the PR algo is patented, how much or what would they be able to change?