Page Rank all White?

What does it mean when you have all white Page Rank Bar

[The Subtle Knife]

After going through a panic, as I noticed
a few of our sites were all white!

I noticed the admin sections of the site are white,
and whole chunks of the Microsoft Site are white.

I tested this and went into the admin of a site
that had page rank, and it turned white.

So what does all white actually mean?

Grey means, not indexed yet?

[agerhart]

If it is ALL white = PR0

usually means you were penalized.

[CuriousWeb]

or have a PR of less than 1

[The Subtle Knife]

like i said, if I goto a page that has PR of 3,
and login other parts of the sites admin area,
the PR bar turns white!

Hence, a white bar can't be always bad right?

[WebWalla]

Or the main page has been indexed, but that particular section hasn't.

[hitchhiker]

Sometimes, a couple of our sites have this, i think it means you've only made it into the index, but have no pagerank yet.

(no external links etc etc)

I've read here somewhere you shouldn't panic, just wait for Cassandra

*don't panic*

[Happy Online]

Yep, I have a white bar as Page Rank - but that is only because the site has recently been launched - no links etc - however I am getting Freshbot on every single page :) - therefore does not always mean a penalty (I assume)

[rfgdxm1]

Have you been doing anything naughty that you deserve the Google Death Penalty?

[Good_Vibes]

You can assure yourself that if you are in ODP or Yahoo, and your home page has a PR white bar, that you have been penalized.

[hitchhiker]

It all depends on how long your site has been in the index. If it's only one index old, then PR0 generally can mean anything.. Just don't panic till it's older! (it is a 1 index or less site right?)

[skipfactor]

by admin, do you mean pwd protected?

My pwd protected areas have a PR1 even though they've always been disallowed & never linked from main site. However, disallowed cgi-bin admin stuff has PR0, can't figure that one out.

[daamsie]

If you have a pr 3 on your front page for example, but then have your admin pages two directories down you are most likely just seeing a guessed pr.

For example:

www.widget.com = pr3

Guessed PRs
www.widget.com/test.htm = pr2
www.widget.com/admin/index.htm = pr1
www.widget.com/admin/news/edit.htm = pr0

Whatever the case, the only ones that matter are the ones that people can actually get to - so don't fret over the PR of your admin pages ;)

[Marketing Guy]

I think Google need to start use more colours on the PR bar! :)

RED: Banned!
Orange: Just penalised...
Blue: Google recommended (er...for all my sites only...)

Scott :)

[The Subtle Knife]

Right, so we all agree having a white bar
is only seen as bad, if it remains indefinitely,
or for a long time.
my gut feeling that the white bar on my sites, is just
a very low or passed PR. (they are very new sites some of them) Plus large chunks of the Microsoft site are white, which I think shows a white bar is not a proper indicator of being penalised.

Natually if it remains white for many months, then I'll worry.

Jesus, some posts here about having a white bar are enough to give me a heart attack!

Google should use a different shade to indicate a ban, really they should. If your banned you should bloody know about it!

[WibbleWobble]

Why would you worry about the admin section having no PR? I don't get the logic.

[Tony_Perry]

you should worry? I have a new site with all 50 pages now indexed by GG and 32 of them all page 1 for the keywords/phrases, yet every page is still greybar! explain that?

[garylo]

Index page = Pr0 - usually means the site is penalized

[hitchhiker]

There's just not enough conclusive proof either way that PR0 = ban (especially when the site is new index wise).. it could just mean PageRank is 0 :)

Let's hear back in a couple of weeks (or less i hope)

[daamsie]

It seems you are confusing your site's PR with your page's PR. I would consider your site's PR as the PR of your front page only. Each individual page will have a different PR from there.

Your site isn't banned/penalized or anything unless the front page has a PR0, so don't worry about the white bar unless it is your front page (even then it's possibly just a VERY low PR).

I don't think Google would go to the bother of penalizing specific pages on a website :)

(unless it's a geocities page I guess)

[daamsie]

Tony, your site's pages are probably just indexed by freshbot and not properly yet. Your experience does show that PR isn't everything though, as you are probably doing well because of well-phrased headers, title etc..

[rfgdxm1]

>Index page = Pr0 - usually means the site is penalized

Nope. I was just poking around yesterday on the reciprocal links section of a site that has 500+ on the page. Many to minor little sites where this is the only inbound link. Googlebot found all these little sites from the link, but since the page has 500+ links all it is good for is to give those sites a PR0.

[Marcia]

PR0 means that the page has Page Rank of less than one. That's a different story from what the reason for it is. If there's a page attached to a domain - like the admin section, or the control panel of the site, Google may know about the existence of the domain but that page is password protected and has no links; there's no PR to give it.

Pages that are parked can have PR0 (like at registrars). They just have no PR - meaning less than PR1 - and if it was a previously owned domain that ended up penalized before, it wouldn't really show up until after the domain went live and there were enough links with enough PR to it for it to be expected to have PR.

We can probably give ourselves a break from stressing out if we assume with a new site that

grey = not in index
PR0 = Page Rank is less than 1

Once the site goes through a couple of crawls and updates and *should* have decent PR, if it's still grey or PR0 then it's time to worry. But it still doesn't necessarily mean a penalty for the domain. Before panicking about penalties it's probably the way of peace to examine the site itself first to see if there are any problems.

I have a site that wasn't being indexed, in spite of a couple of good links. It would have been, had I not forgotten to take the <meta="robots" content="noindeex,nofollow"> off the homepage.