PR Zero / White Bar Rears It's Ugly Head...

...on a site that has yet to be laucnhed.

[HyperGeek]

A group of collegues noticed that one of their sites was slapped with a PR 0 (or white bar) and it wasn't even submitted to Google.

One spider might have found it's "Coming Soon" page, and then added it --- thus attracting GoogleBot.

Question: Is this permanent for that domain or can it be "fixed" when the site launches and gets some inbound links from DMOZ, et al.?

NOTE: It did not previously have any PR associated to it. I believe the reason for the 0 is that the site has no contents (or, more specifically, links to the content that exists on the server.) Google would then deem this unimportant.

[IanTurner]

I have seen this too on a site that is under development. No promotion or optimisation work yet done.

It could be from site spidered because they have been visited from a browser with the google toolbar, there was a thread on this subject not long ago, if you use site search you should be able to find it.

[DrCool]

I saw the same thing on a site I was building. It had a PR0 while under construction but on this last index it got a PR. Just be patient and it should take care of itself.

[nancyb]

My guess would be the google toolbar. I was going to develop a site and put up a simple under construction page. It was linked to/from no where, no one even knew about it but me. I looked at the site with IE and forgot to disable the google toolbar. Googlebot showed up several days later. I put up a robots.txt disallow and she only came back once since then and obeyed the disallow.

[Beachboy]

I have had the white toolbar show up on new sites. Seems to mean the new site was added to the index but its PR not yet calculated. In each case, the PR was added with the following crawl. Relax, probably it's nothing.

[rfgdxm1]

Wouldn't it be normal for a page with no inbound links to have a PR0?

[IanTurner]

Yes - at least thats the way I see it

[HyperGeek]

Okay, I just wanted to clear that up.

It's a scary thing seeing a whitebar on a web site that hasn't even had a chance to prove itself.

Everyone at his office used the toolbar, so that must have been why GoogleB found the site.

Now, on the other hand, if you have a PR 4 and you see a white bar the next day --- that's when you should start worrying. :)

Thanks for your replies!

[Jane_Doe]

I put up a new site about a month ago. Initially all of the pages had gray bar and then after a week or two the bar turned all white. This was before the site had any inbound links showing up in Google. After the next Google update the site had one inbound link from a PR5 site. With that, the index page became a PR4 with the other pages being PR4 through PR2, depending on how deep they were in the link structure and how many cross links they had from within the site.

[Marcia]

Right, it doesn't mean anything until there's PR calculated. I've got a site just up on ISP web space that showed PR4 as soon as it was uploaded, which is just "guesswork" toolbar PR, it's just as meaningless. There are some links to it, so when those are tallied in then it'll show something real, but whether it's PR4 or PR0 now doesn't mean a thing.