linking to PR0 sites

PR0=penalized? or safe to link to?

[tristan]

I was wondering if a PR0 always means that a site is penalised, or if it could be that the site just has almost no links to it (but enough to get indexed)?
I'm running a small search engine/directory type of site, and get lots of site submissions, I always try to check out the submissions to see if they use any obvious spam techniques (hidden text, etc.), so I don't burn my own site by linking to them.
But that made me wonder about PR0... right now I'm kinda afraid to link to them even if they got good content, and don't seem to be using anything fishy...

As a temporary fix, I used to link to the submissions via a redirecting cgi script like this:
/cgi-bin/link.pl?http://www.webmasterworld.com/
and disallow that script with a robots.txt
But in this last update (and maybe even already before that) I see that those link *do* get counted as link toward that site...
I could modify the script so the url isn't a clear parameter, but I don't want to be the jerk that doesn't want to give his PR away to a quality site...

so: PR0 - better not link to it, or is it safe?

[deejay]

I've just started tonight on an SEO review of a site for a designer friend. First thing I noticed is that it's PR0.

It's not a pre-loved domain name, there's not a hint of SEO about it (heh.. I'm gonna have a field day), and it's certainly not a case of spammy linking techniques.

In fact, there's only one link to it at present - which is how Google found it - from a low PR page.

So yes, I believe it is possible to have a PR0 page that is simply so low on the PR scale it doesn't register.

[tristan]

>I believe it is possible to have a PR0 page that is simply so low on the PR scale it doesn't register

So you can't tell if a page is penalized just by looking at the PR?
Any other ways you can know to prevent yourself linking to such sites?

[deejay]

I think if you look at the backlinks and establish who is linking to the site.. if there are any number of links that indicate it should have a higher PR than it does, then be wary - there's probably a penalty there.

In the case I mention though, the site is two months old and there is only the one insignificant page linking to it.. it just doesn't have enough links yet to GET reasonable PR. It's a minor miracle that Google actually has it indexed at this stage.

[sanity]

I have a site that had a whole section go PR0 last month. It was an internal linking problem and there was nothing spammy about the site.

We deduced that the internal liking problems trapped googlebot in the section so it PR0'd the pages to stop itself getting trapped again.

I fixed up the linking and it's gone back to PR3 this update. Before the PR0 it had a better PR so I'm hoping this will again increase over time.

[stuntdubl]

If I may ask....

What type of linking would accidently 'trap' googlebot?

[sanity]

Bear in mind I'm not technical but here goes:

A section of the site was deleted and a new section added in it's place. All the pages in the old section had a server side redirect to the index of the new section. (Not done by me!) From how it was explained to me this may have trapped googlebot.

So far it's the only explanation I can come up with.

[mack]

What i found with the last site i built was that when i first published the site it was grayed out. (not ranked by google) after it's first spidering it was all white, No PR at all. I then got an ODP link from a PR5 page within the directory and on next crawl it was showing PR4. So sometimes a site can apear to be a PR0 when in fact there simply is no PR to display (no penalty).