I have a site that has a page rank three front page (formerly page rank 1) most of the inner pages are page rank two or three.... but one of the inner pages is page rank four!!! with no back links to this page and only 12 words of content and a picture! why does Google feel this page is a page rank 4?
Just because no back links are reported by Google, doesn't mean they don't exist. Also the back pages might have structural differences. My best ranked page is inside...on two different sites.
Number of words would be a factor. It may be that this is a competitive area but everyone else has duplicate or lesser content than this handful of words.
trust me, this inner page has no back links to it other then being linked to from the main menu of this site. if I have a menu of say 8 content items, the main page with a PR3 and these 8 items which are inner pages with PRs 2 and 3 - why is this one random page out of the 8 content items equaling a PR4? (100% no external inbound links to this specific page) it does not make sense and perhaps proves the pointlessness of PR?
No it wouldn't. Do you know what PR even is? What you are seeing is either an outdated PR value or it does have more PR flowing in than the other pages, quite possibly because you do have links pointing to it but you just don't know about it. And yes PR is pointless. Whatever it is, it is no mystery.
try to check the cached date and also try to use SEO tools determining the live pr.. High PR without any content is useless.. Assume that i'll drop some time...
the reason is simple . your subpages has backlinks. the page rank is only related with backlinks. you are saying it has pr 4. this means that you have links to your subpages