Do 'free hosting' sites inherit their 'parent site's PR?

On the coattails of but irrelevent to the 'lost freehosting sites' caper

[Josefu]

I see a lot of "***.free.com" and "*****.yahoo.com" sites coming up on top in many of my searches. I was wondering if a 'freehosted' site, in reality but a subdomain of the parent hosting site, would 'inherit' some of the PR for the whole of, say, yahoo.com? By what I've seen this seems in some way to be the case, but thankfully the web isn't flooded with 'serious' or commercial sites hosted in this way. Is what I'm seeing true?

[ThomasB]

That shouldn't be the case. I've never seen sth like that. I always realized that the site ranking better (even yahoo) had more/better backlinks, better content or sometimes just more luck. But a subdomain from a big player doesn't help as far as I can see.

[frances]

I have seen something similar. I dont know if its free webhosting or something else. But definitely some otherwise unexceptional pages are ranking highly on the coatails of a much larger domain whose name precedes theirs in the url.

I interpreted it (dont know if I'm right) not as a passing on of page rank, but as Google mistakenly viewing the sub-page as a branch of a large 'authority' site.

Incidentally, did anybody see a change in the serps yesterday? One of my sites (a previously high-performing small commercial site sent way down in austin) came back quite strongly for all search terms.

[Josefu]

I interpreted it (dont know if I'm right) not as a passing on of page rank, but as Google mistakenly viewing the sub-page as a branch of a large 'authority' site.

...that's sort of how I saw it, sorry perhaps I wasn't clear enough. If that were the case the 'sub' domain would inherit most of the 'parent' domain's PR...