Has anyone else noticed the change in how new pages are rated? It used to be said that a banned domain would have their PR toolbar grayed out, but now it seems any new page is getting a gray toolbar and "No PageRank information available". (Just look at the rank for this thread or any other new thread and you'll see what I mean.) While I think this is somewhat more fair than giving a new page a zero rating it also is going to make it much harder to determine if a site has been banned. Has anyone seen any conversation from Cutt's or Google talking about this? Any ideas why the change?
Now gray bar meant the page was not indexed by google. Yes, you're right... now it is difficult to determine a site is banned or not. you have to do a search in google to see the site is indexed...
I am not agree with this. Gray bar doesn't mean that page not indexed by google. Pages in gray bar still showing in google's cache.
Since the update it has been common to see PR0 sites with a grey-bar instead of the usual white which would indicate PR0. It doesn't mean you don't have a PR yet. You may have a PR of value lower than 1. Also this has no influence on your rankings.
I have been noticing many, many sites with link exchanges and directory sites getting gray barred on the link results pages. I'm seeing this all over the place...
My first thought was that it might have something to do with the campaign against paid links, but then why would people pay much for a new and possibly non-indexed page? It would appear this was done for some reason. What would be more useful is if they used gray for new, white for found but lacking in SEO - a true PR0, green as usual, and perhaps red for banned sites.