oddsod - 12:52 pm on Apr 16, 2009 (gmt 0)

I've seen it happen too. Sometimes you can't guarantee no IBLs, Brett, but on the balance of probabilities just know that a page shouldn't have PR.

I setup a page just to test a theory of mine about Google indexing. It had a meta norobots but was not robots.txt blocked. It wasn't linked to from anywhere and only Google's toolbar knew the page existed. My stats are password protected so the URL couldn't have been found there. I setup an alert for links to that page. Contrary to some experiences here, the page didn't make it into SERPs but, when I removed the norobots meta - bingo! the page got PR in the update a few days later. Still no IBLs listed in any of the SEs or WMT.

Low value pages with even a few links from (even lower value) pages on social bookmarking and networking pages (and nofollow blog comments!) seem to be gaining PR over similar pages with a few new, solid PR4-6 links and a DMOZ entry. Again, contrary to how toolbar PR has behaved in the early years.