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1. Because they don't understand PageRank properly and they think that by making an uncrawlable page they are in some way protecting their site from leaking PR! A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
2. They don't want to encourage tons of spam - webmasters will do anything to get links with PR. Nullifying PR on directory pages might be a strategy to keep quality results.
3. Google Toolbar is misreporting PR, and is being particularly funny about internal pages.
3. Google Toolbar is misreporting PR, and is being particularly funny about internal pages.
Most directories have very long urls, no? (at least if you rewrite them that way...) Something like:
Main_Cat/Sub_cat1/Sub_cat2/...
From what I see, the toolbar has some difficulty giving an accurate guess of pages buried "levels" down in a site.
No. The toolbar always has difficulty giving an accurate guess. It just gives a less flattering guess to pages buried deeper in subdirectories. But that guess isn't used in page rank (how can it be? the page has no indexed words to be found by, so it's never in any ranking).
So ignore the guess. If your site structure follows your directory structure, and your internal linking is good, then the guess will be more accurate. But...you don't organize your site sensibly to get a higher value on an irrelevant datum. Instead, you organize your site sensibly so users can use it.
Also, it could just be a new page that hasn't been assigned PR yet.
I agree. Not many people started off with links directory. Thay had a links page. Then as time progresses they realized that directories are better suited to properly organize links. Hence these pages might be new.
