Is PR filtered? Strange PR-distribution doesn't fit model anymore.

[cangoou]

(When talking of PR here I mean the visible PR in the toolbar)

Hello! Some time ago, when you got let's say 2-3 PR5 links, you could be sure that your site gets a PR4. Today I got pages which get with such links a PR4 as well as pages with a PR0.

Even equally strange is the PR-distribution inside a site: A PR4 on the mainpage doesn't mean anymore that the subpages on 1st level will get a PR3, they get everything between no PR to PR3.

My observation is that this all could not be explained with the normal PR-model saying that PR spreads equally between the links of a page.

My question is: What could trigger such a thing that the "normal" PR inheritance is turned off and a page get less PR as it would deserver considering the PR-model?

I found, that often subpages with many outgoing links of with litte text gets a less PR then they should. But that doesn't seem to be a rule: I got subpages which got no PR at all with plenty of unique text and another sibling page with other unique text got the PR it should have.

Any ideas about that?

[tedster]

I've been seeing similar changes for a while now and have only got vague theories. It's almost as if the "type" of page receving the link affects how much PR can get through to it - and Google decides what that page type is according to some mystery formula.

[cangoou]

I'm doing some experiments on it right now. I got a site with 8 subpages: 7 subpages are the same topic, 1 is not and has a external link on it. The 7 subpages got PR mainpage-1, the 1 page with the link got a PR grey.

[Pass the Dutchie]

I have found that pages with no, duplicate, or identical description text as found in the page body text warrants a greybar.

[tedster]

I've noticed that pages with many external links are highly likely to carry a graybar PR. That just means "we're not sharing the PR data at this time", it doesn't mean "zero". You can see this on many directories, for instance - even the very best.

I think this is might be one step in Google's war against paid links - and (I'm not as certain here) it also might show that such pages are often not considered good pages to show in search results.