tedster - 1:34 am on Jun 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

Historically, having inner pages with a higher PR than the domain root has been a healthy sign -- it "should" mean lots of inbound links to specific, deep pages.

That was historically. The reports we've been hearing are from people who know of no deep IBLs to their site, or at least very few. So I don't think we can use historical standards to understand this current phenomenon, which just became widespread when toolbar PR was updated right after the Big Daddy roll-out was finished. There were lots of PR anomalies reported at that time.

At any rate, these newly discovered high PR pages do not seem to show any results in terms of ranking and Google search traffic. So the general feeling among people I talk to is that something is off, or non-standard, about the way toolbar PR is currently being reported. In some cases (such as this one) it may be that home page PR is calculated one way and other pages are seeing their PR calculated in a "new" and perhaps unintended manner.

It is always traffic that matters. So if a higher PR isn't generating traffic, then what good is it? Well, as long as it lasts, it might help attract more links from those people who worry about PR before they link. So that's at least one silver lining, even if it is a thin one.

I would suggest checking for canonical problems (of the "www" and "index.html" type) and making sure that the domain root resolves as is, with no redirects.