Panicked the last time you saw the toolbar PR go gray? Don’t worry too much about what you might have done wrong because until now what the graybar really exactly means is still unclear. According to Ann Smarty of Search Enging Journal though some of the things that we do know about the graybar includes the following facts:

Whatever the graybar really does mean Google still hasn’t cleared it up but what’s important is that if you do see the TBPR turn gray just do a quick review on the latest changes you’ve made to your site and assess whether some of the tactics you’ve employed are questionable. Check the usual things that could have gone wrong like being hacked/spammed. If everything’s as it should be then there’s no reason to panic, more likely than not the TBPR will eventually just go back to showing your old PR. We all know that Google constantly tweaks its algorithm so you’ll just have to ride out the changes they might have made.

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Seo Roundtable recently did a poll on “artificial pagerank” and found out that 54% of the 153 SEOs that participated in the survey do believe in its existence. But what is artificial pagerank exactly?

Artificial pagerank is simply a boost in pagerank given by Google to pages to certain pages that do not seem to merit the high ranking due to the (few) number of links. SEO Roundtable became interested in finding out people’s opinion about the issue due to a discussion in Webmasterworld where someone reported having a website that had a PR jump from 4 to 5 even with only one low value inbound link (PR 0). Interestingly other SEOs have come across the same thing with some other pages. Of course, this lead to different theories pointing to the possible reasons for increase in PR including a faulty PR toolbar, Google not showing all incoming links, etc. What stuck the most, since they did make sense are these two replies:

Tedster: My assumption is that this unusual PR boost is one of the ways that Google helps “mom and pop” sites compete – something that Matt Cutts made a side comment about on his blog a few years ago. He never said WHAT Google does specifically, only that they do a few things. Now if we only knew how they identify a “mom and pop”, eh?

Ankit Maheshwari: Was thinking that Google might have started to give higher PR on local parameters. So in place of calculating the importance of a page globally, it has started doing it region-wise. IMO, this might be the next big change that Google might be testing, i.e to have higher PR sites within Geo-specific niches as well that might not be linked by million other sites, however within there niche/region/location are linked by most.

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