Pagerank Grey bar for pages of a website - why do we see it
Written by Search Engine Genie
@ 11:27 AM
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Thursday, April 24, 2008
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I have seen Greybar display in Google toolbar for quite sometime, I am sure people are wondering what causes it. Personally I can speculate some reasons though i don't have any evidence it. Here are some reasons I see what causes Grey bar display,
1. New pages: When ever a new page is created i don't see a white PR bar anymore. Its grey PageRank display when ever there is a new page created. So as we know if Google has not assigned a PageRank it used to show white bar now its not the case any more we see Grey PageRank display for all new pages which is definitely new with Google.
2. Abandoned Pages: Pages which are not updated for a long time without any update are showing Grey bar i am seeing it across couple of our pages / websites. So probably it has something to do with abandoned pages.
3. Duplicate Pages: When a competitor or some spammer copies contents of that page and duplicates in his site pages the main page might loose its existing value and can display Grey bar. Seeing this substantially duplicate pages do have some reason for Grey Toolbar PageRank display.
4. Potentially penalty to those pages especially link exchange pages since I see more and more grey display in link exchange pages. This is just a speculation though penalty is the least reason I can imagine of since I see lot of grey PageRank pages rank in search engines.
5. A standard reason which has always been is that the communication between your toolbar and Google data center which delivers PageRank to toolbar is some how interrupted. Though this has been a reason given directly by Google employees still i wonder how one page can fetch PageRank from Google data center and other page cannot at the same time. This is a reason but very rare unless you see grey bar for all sites and pages you browse it cannot be justified.
6. Some people speculate Grey bar display has something to do with supplemental index. Google has been into controversy for a long time on supplemental pages debate. Pages in supplemental index never rank and some have seen grey PageRank pages also never rank so it could be a by product of supplemental results. Just an idea only.
7. Bad PR distribution for those pages from internal pages of your site. If those pages don't have good PR distribution then it could cause grey PageRank but for many sites i monitor those pages have ton of internal links. For Example our blog homepage has link from all over our site but shows grey PageRank display. We see this page is crawled regularly, contents from this page is indexed regularly but still it shows Grey PageRank very difficult to say this as a reason.
8. Lack of Good external links or consistent external links to a page: I seriously wonder whether this could be a reason. Most of the inner pages I have seen that shows grey bar has very less or zero external links from other sites coming into it. So i wonder whether this could be a reason for grey bar. PageRank algorithm probably sees that this page is important only for this site and is not a good page for Internet. I do have controversy over this too. Again our blog URL have good links coming to it from external sites but it displays grey bar don't know why. But recently our blog never got Good back links we seriously abandoned our blog for about a year and never posted any new information. So lack of consistent back links could be a reason for Grey PageRank display.
9. TPR ( Toolbar PageRank Reduction ) : Another reason i can speculate is the infamous Toolbar PageRank Reduction penalty which Google applied to sites which buy and sell text links. Is Grey PageRank bar a side effect of it?
My final opinion is if a page is more than a year indexed in Google and has a PR grey bar it could simply be that the page is not of best value for its users. So they dont assign pagerank for that page which might result in that page not passing pagerank to other pages in other words not contributing any link juice to the pages it links to.
Search Engine Genie
1. New pages: When ever a new page is created i don't see a white PR bar anymore. Its grey PageRank display when ever there is a new page created. So as we know if Google has not assigned a PageRank it used to show white bar now its not the case any more we see Grey PageRank display for all new pages which is definitely new with Google.
2. Abandoned Pages: Pages which are not updated for a long time without any update are showing Grey bar i am seeing it across couple of our pages / websites. So probably it has something to do with abandoned pages.
3. Duplicate Pages: When a competitor or some spammer copies contents of that page and duplicates in his site pages the main page might loose its existing value and can display Grey bar. Seeing this substantially duplicate pages do have some reason for Grey Toolbar PageRank display.
4. Potentially penalty to those pages especially link exchange pages since I see more and more grey display in link exchange pages. This is just a speculation though penalty is the least reason I can imagine of since I see lot of grey PageRank pages rank in search engines.
5. A standard reason which has always been is that the communication between your toolbar and Google data center which delivers PageRank to toolbar is some how interrupted. Though this has been a reason given directly by Google employees still i wonder how one page can fetch PageRank from Google data center and other page cannot at the same time. This is a reason but very rare unless you see grey bar for all sites and pages you browse it cannot be justified.
6. Some people speculate Grey bar display has something to do with supplemental index. Google has been into controversy for a long time on supplemental pages debate. Pages in supplemental index never rank and some have seen grey PageRank pages also never rank so it could be a by product of supplemental results. Just an idea only.
7. Bad PR distribution for those pages from internal pages of your site. If those pages don't have good PR distribution then it could cause grey PageRank but for many sites i monitor those pages have ton of internal links. For Example our blog homepage has link from all over our site but shows grey PageRank display. We see this page is crawled regularly, contents from this page is indexed regularly but still it shows Grey PageRank very difficult to say this as a reason.
8. Lack of Good external links or consistent external links to a page: I seriously wonder whether this could be a reason. Most of the inner pages I have seen that shows grey bar has very less or zero external links from other sites coming into it. So i wonder whether this could be a reason for grey bar. PageRank algorithm probably sees that this page is important only for this site and is not a good page for Internet. I do have controversy over this too. Again our blog URL have good links coming to it from external sites but it displays grey bar don't know why. But recently our blog never got Good back links we seriously abandoned our blog for about a year and never posted any new information. So lack of consistent back links could be a reason for Grey PageRank display.
9. TPR ( Toolbar PageRank Reduction ) : Another reason i can speculate is the infamous Toolbar PageRank Reduction penalty which Google applied to sites which buy and sell text links. Is Grey PageRank bar a side effect of it?
My final opinion is if a page is more than a year indexed in Google and has a PR grey bar it could simply be that the page is not of best value for its users. So they dont assign pagerank for that page which might result in that page not passing pagerank to other pages in other words not contributing any link juice to the pages it links to.
Search Engine Genie
Labels: pagerank, pagerank update
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