Pagerank where it shouldn't be

My Yahoo Mailbox has started showing Pagerank

[roddy]

For some reason, my Yahoo Inbox has started showing pagerank of 2. As I understand it, that shouldn't happen. Googlebot shouldn't be able to spider it, and it's impossible to backlink to.

Any ideas?

Roddy

[DaveN]

Toolbar guessing. it knows yahoo has a high PR and therefore just guesses

Dave

[mack]

This is very probably not a true pagerank reading. It will simply be an estimate that is produced by the Google pagerank server.

It works by making an estimate of what it thinks the page rank shoudl be. For example the Yahoo homepage has a PR10, so it will make an estimate of what it thinks it should be further down the site tree.

Mack.

[edit_g]

The path for your mailbox might be something like yahoo/users/public/regional/uk/yourname/youremailaddy. The toolbar would probably extrapolate the PR from however many directories down your mailbox is.

Does that make any sense? (I'm not sure...)

<added>What mack said! :)

[doc_z]

I know that in the past the Toolbar was guessing PR. However, is there currently still a ToolbarPR guess? I'm seeing PR0 instead of a guess.

[denisl]

So how do we know if any displayed PR is a pure guess?

[edit_g]

So how do we know if any displayed PR is a pure guess?

Because a search engine would not be able to spider your inbox (password and username protected etc) so any PR Google assigns can only be an extrapolation the toolbar makes from looking at the URL.

[doc_z]

So how do we know if any displayed PR is a pure guess?

- If the page isn't indexed, then PR is guessed.
- If the page is indexed and you find backlinks, then the PR is real.
- If the page is indexed, but no backlinks are shown, you cannot make a decision.