Pages not getting PR passed on

[Trax]

I have a problem with one of my sites that runs on a custom made CMS and its driving me nuts.

The homepage has a steady PR3 and around 140 internal links, most of them category pages. Yet, aside from the index, only a handful of the category pages carry any PR (for months now). Being there for over a year now, shouldn't those pages show at least a grey PR bar (PR0)?

Anyone has any experiences with that? What can cause such selective PR passing. I know I shouldn't be too focused on PR but when more than 90% of the sites are "unranked" (not even PR0) and also not ranking well, I start to worry and wonder what could possibly be wrong.
Any ideas?

[tedster]

Since you say "at least a gray bar", I assume that you are seeing a white bar. A white bar means that the page has PR above 0 and less than 1. Only a gray bar means no data. So you're doing BETTER than a gray bar.

Splitting a PageRank vote of 3 across 140 links could very well give each of those target pages a PageRank of "less than 1".

[edited by: tedster at 8:33 am (utc) on July 28, 2009]

[Trax]

I meant at least a white bar, sorry.

[tedster]

Ah, the infamous gray bar problem. I don't know anyone who has mastered the understanding of what Google is up to with that. Are you getting any direct search traffic to those internal pages?

[Trax]

not really no... but quite a few have decent rankings on yahoo which is what confuses me a bit.

since you imply nobody knows what up with what google wants to tell me with the gray bar, are you aware of people recovering? adjusting things to impose change?

[tedster]

Nobody knows the WHOLE story - but some things do seem clear. Pages that are essentially collections of links, or very thin on content (stub pages) seem to get gray-barred. Pages that sell links sometimes get gray-barred. Sometimes on web directories, even the top shelf variety, you see internal pages get gray-barred. And yet those pages still seem to help the urls that they link to. Clear evidence to me that gray-bar doesn't mean zero - it just means "we've got no data we will share right now."

I don't know of any specific tactics that have resulted in the removal of a gray bar - but they do come and go anyway. I find it frustrating, but not worth a lot of direct attention. I just keep building more value into the site and make sure that I get the word out.