white toolbar

why?

[whatson]

When a site has a white toolbar, or a Pagerank lower that you would expect (about 2 or 3), this is usually due to a penalty.
I was wondering does Google manually select these sites and penalize them, or do they have some sort of algorithm where if a site is doing something wrong it will automatically receive a penalty.
If it is the latter then if you removed anything that was against Googles guidelines then would the PR penalty be removed?

[vitaplease]

I would say the majority of PR0 pages are simply PR0 pages, no penalty involved.

About Google penalties, other than the spamreports, I guess they would have algos to detect possible spam, they raise the red flag, and if your unlucky or unwise, the penalty is imposed.
There might be some blatant stuff though, on which Google relies entirily on an automatic detection and penalty regime.

It seems that every once in a while, Google has a good mood and removes penalties: [webmasterworld.com...]

[ciml]

I agree with vitaplease; almost all PR0 and low PR pages just don't have good enough links to have more PageRank.

The only common PR penalty I see is from linking to 'bad neighbourhoods', which seem mostly to be hand reviewed.

[jayq]

The white one is fine. You will see it most often on new sites with few links. I've raised many a white bars up. Don't be concerned about it. Just find good relevant links that are not your crosslinked sites.

The gray bar is a different animal entirely. I've even seen freshbot sites with a gray get good ranking.

If you have an established site that has not suffered a decent amout of server time recently and you are gray - then you might need to start getting worried.