Grey bar on #2 site

what would cause this

[snowfox121]

Checking out my competition tonight and found the #2 site for my keywords has a grey bar in the PageRank.

How can they be grey and #2 out of 600,000 results?

[OldFatherTime]

How can they be grey and still returned from the directory? The tooltip for 'grey' says "Current page is not ranked by Google" - Or, alternatively, grey indicates a Google ban - but there it is, in the index...
Either way, confusion reigns.

[snowfox121]

Well, confusion or not, i did a Google search for "blue widgets" and TWO of the top 20 results had a grey bar with the message you mention. i have a PR 5 and they are both well above me. As i said, one of them is #2.

[AAnnAArchy]

I have a site that's #1 for its search term and it has a grey bar. It's a new site and this is its first month in Google.

AAnn

[lolo7]

The same situation: For my query site at #8 has a gray bar.
I'm at #9 and have a PR=7.
Google is becoming crazy.

[JonB]

check the sites with "WWW." - in many cases checking without "www." will give grey bar.and someties it is jsut a toobar glitch (hit reload several times)

[Macguru]

AAnnAArchy and JonB gave us some pretty good clues here :

I have a site that's #1 for its search term and it has a grey bar. It's a new site and this is its first month in Google.

1) Make sure the listing has no "fresh" date.

Sometimes pages with some pretty decent internal factors combination pops in the way of higher PR pages. This is a temporary situation.

check the sites with "WWW." - in many cases checking without "www."

2) Make sure the URL you are checking PR on is the same as in Google's serps.

Not only google considers it as different entities, but there is a lot of redirect "tricks" out there.

Also, could be a temporarly glitch...

[AAnnAArchy]

Okay, now this is going to get even stranger. My site has had a grey bar PR since it got into Google on the update. Today, for the first time, it has a PR4. Not only that, it has two backlinks from Yahoo! Business and Economy>Shopping and Services>Gambling>Web- ...
Yahoo! Directory -- uh, it isn't in Yahoo and it isn't a gambling site. Not only that, it has a backlink from an adult counter...and it isn't an adult site either.

To add more intrigue, Google crawled it during the few seconds before the site went live, so the description is a hosting company error. So, I'm #1 and it's almost useless because the description is wrong. It's nice to get backlinks from PR5 sites in error though. :) It does have one legit PR5 link. So, I guess a new site getting three links from PR5 sites can get you to #1 even though for a week or two, you might see a grey bar. Perhaps the grey bar is just in limbo waiting for calculations.

AAnn

[snowfox121]

Just a follow-up to close this thread. Checked these sites with grey bars today and they are no longer grey. It must have been a toolbar screwup.

Thanks for taking the time to help.