link checking 101

what am I missing?

[chewy]

So I'm checking the toolbar page rank of some sites.

I find one at 3, with 300 backlinks as reported by the Yahoo Explorer.

I find another at 4, with 4 backlinks.

For the one with 4, I check all the TBPR and backlinks of these backlinks - and surprise -- no substantial numbers of backlinks or decent sites linking to these pages.

I find this very surprising -- what could I be overlooking?

[cnvi]

what could I be overlooking?

age of page, content in the page, and anomalies ever present in the algorythms that compute pagerank causing you to jump to conclusions.

[chewy]

what's surprising is that all the sites that link to this site are very new sites with no backlinks. there is one anomaly that does look promising, but it comes as a surprise.