Can old grey barred pages ever regain PR?

[claaarky]

Has anyone ever seen pages that have been grey barred for over a year regain PR?

We have a site with hundreds of grey barred pages which we now know is due to duplicate content elsewhere on the web. I've been advised to make the content unique, create a new page and redirect the old page to the new one.

I'm wondering if there's any possibility the old page will ever attain PR once the content has been made unique.

[darkyl]

Yes, I've seen pages that had a grey bar for a long time turn green.

I don't know exactly what triggered the change but here's what I did:

- Lowered keyword density
- Improved site navigation (also removing or nofollowing links or links groups that google could confuse with double menus)
- Got a few incoming links (not many)
- Made on page text (especially headings) less similar to the meta title (used synonyms or semantically related words in them).

[rainborick]

I've been battling graybars on a couple of sites for over a year, and only this last update showed any changes for me. I wish I could tell you that I had a formula for success here, but I don't. Many of the graybarred pages I have might well deserve it, but many others simply don't. Quality of the page content seems to be a major factor, since many of the pages are predominantly lists of links and Google's been waging war against link exchange and directory-type listings. So there's an explanation for some of this beyond duplicate content. It still bothers me since many of them are major navigation pages or HTML sitemap pages. I tried beefing up a few of the naviagtion pages, and a couple of them are now showing PageRank - but certainly not all of them. A direct external link, or at least close proximity to a page with a good external link, seems to ward this off... sometimes.

I've become resigned to accepting the situation and haven't really put as much effort into it as I should as yet.

[minnapple]

Big yep

[AnkitMaheshwari]

After adding unique content, also get some inlinks to these pages.

[claaarky]

How long would you expect to wait for a grey barred page which has been completely rewritten to start appearing in search results again? Let's say the rewritten content is spidered today.

Our unique pages rank very well (generally top for the exact page title) so once it starts ranking again it's likely to be on page 1, probably top.