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MyWifeSays - 11:58 pm on Nov 13, 2008 (gmt 0)
The link directory has 27 pages, a home page which links to 26 pages with external links on. Each of these pages links only back to the home page and to a number of external websites varying from 1 to about 20. The home page has a PR of 4 and 10 of the link pages have PR's of 3. The rest of the link pages have a grey bar. As far as I can see there is nothing to differentiate the grey PR pages and the PR3 pages. I've even played around with 'nofollow' with the external links, which doesn't seem to make any difference once Google has subsequently updated toolbar PR. One thing I have noticed, which I don't think anybody has mentioned, is that sites that are linked to from the pages with a grey PR do include my page in its backlinks so it doesn't necessarily look like Google is ignoring these pages. The other site has 50 pages, no external links, unique content on each page, and consists of 3 levels. There is a single top level page, linking to 7 pages, these 7 pages all have 8 links, one back to the top level, one to another page in the same level, and 6 to the lower level. Each page in the lowest level also has 8 links, 1 back to the top level and 1 back to each of the 7 pages in the middle level. This second site also suffers from about 2/3 of the pages having a grey bar. Again there's no obvious explanation why some pages have the grey bar and others don't. From what I've seen it doesn't seem to be anything to do with external links or having similar content. The only common factor these 2 sites have and which Google might be targeting, is that a high percentage of their PR comes from just a few links.
When I first saw this phenomenon with one of my sites, which is a very simply linked link directory, I put together another site which has no external links and passed some PR to it from another site which is unconnected to the first site. This second site also has the grey bar disease. Unfortunately after looking at the two totally different cases, I can't give any explanation for this effect.