Question about PR and backlinks

[perom]

Hi,

My site is 5 months old and toolbar is showing PR1 but when I search for backlinks on Google with link:www.mydomain.com Google displays 19 links for my domain. As far as I know backlinks are not shown for sites that are below PR4. So is my site PR4+ and the toolbar is not showing the real PR?
My site is listed in DMOZ and Google directory and also has few PR5 links.

[Marcia]

perom, what we're seeing on the toolbar now isn't reliable for assessing what current PR really is. As long as backlinks are showing up Google's got the links. And if you've got 19 links with one a PR5 and the ODP and Google directories are both PR5 or better with a reasonable number of sites in the categories, yep you're probably PR4, that's a reasonable guess.

Right now we're best off thinking about site content and rankings and forgetting about toolbar PR altogether.

[deejay]

Hi perom

Marcia is right - things are in flux and the toolbar is not terribly trustworthy right now.

But.. you've got things a bit backwards. you said:

As far as I know backlinks are not shown for sites that are below PR4.

The PR of the site itself doesn't matter. When you do a link:www .mydomain.com on Google it only shows you links where the PR of the LINKING PAGE is PR4 or over.

eg, you might have 100 links to your site, of which 20 are PR4 or higher. The search will show those 20 regardless of your own site's PR. It will not, however, show the 80 links of less than PR4, even if your own site is high PR.

That's why we recommend that you do a backlink check on All The Web as well as Google to identify your links of <PR4