ClintFC - 2:39 am on May 9, 2006 (gmt 0)

Googleguy,

I suspect that one of the reasons the "missing pages" problem is taking so long to get a handle on is because we Webmasters are blind to the root cause of the problem.

I believe that the problem is rooted in PageRank and/or Backlinks. Neither of which we can see accurately:

1. Immediately after Big Daddy was rolled out, people started to report "whacky" PRs, as reported by the Google Toolbar. I believe those funny's have now disapeared (I never saw any), but we have no way of knowing what has happened to the "real" PRs.

2. Post Big Daddy, a "link:www.mydomain.com" shows just one backlink to my site (even though there are many more). Again, since "link:" searches were changed a while back so that they no longer show the whole picture, these discrepencies can always be dismissed. I have no way of knowing if the backlinks are truly missing, or if I am simply unable to see them. I suspect that they may well be missing. Hence maybe my PR is now a lot lower than I am seeeing on the Toolbar. Certainly, before BD, a site: search showed many more backlinks for my site.

3. An incorrectly deflated PR, could explain why I see what I see. Only pages that I link directly from my Home page get indexed nowadays. As soon as I put a link to a page on my Home page, in it goes. Remove the Home page link, and out it goes. Maybe my "real" PR is now so low that it only merits indexing one level deep?

Has anyone at Google looked at the "real" PRs and the "real" backlinks lately? If I am right, and these have somehow gone wrong - maybe a lot of backlinks are now truly missing? And, therefore, the PRs are now innacurate?