PR 3 but not in the index?

what exactly does the Site: search reveal?

[Oliver Henniges]

After rewriting my main index page (PR 4) in November it seems as if googlebot has now picked up again at least some of the pages linked to from there and attached a PR of 3 and 2 to them. However: a search like e.g

main-keyword-appearing-on-all-pages site:mainurl

lists only the main-page which is in the D-moz Register. A search with highly specific searchterms for one of these subpages does not come up with a link to it, and there is no competitor around; thus it seems that it does have PR but is not in the index.

What is the background? I thought having a pagerank meant being in the index with all the keywords thoroughly placed on the sub-pages? Is this only temporarily, caused by the actual crawl and flipping between google2 and google3?

[vitaplease]

the newly created pages that you put up with a link from your already indexed PR4 page probably got the estimated Pagerank, which is what Google shows for pages not fully indexed yet.

It usually gives one toolbar Pagerank digit less than the indexpage toolbar Pagerank per directory level down in your site.