I'm pretty sure, there was a difference, different color between banned and not indexed. Thought gray was banned and all white was, not indexed or, who knows.

I have seen some of that, but I am talking mostly about index pages here.

While that is true to a certain extent, it would really suck if I did it that way and lost all of my Google traffic because I was linking to too many of what Google considers "bad" sites.

My understanding is grey bar meant not in the index, whether it be banned or just not indexed yet. White bar meant the site was indexed, but not assigned any PR that exceeded 1 yet.

An index page loosing it's pr is unusual, and I've not yet seen it happen with the bobbling that can affect interior pages.

Can you give an example? Without a specific case it's just hard to say.

Reluctantly, I will. Not picking on anyone here, just the first 2 examples I came across.

http://free-porn-lord.com/ - site has been online since 2002. There is no PR anywhere on the site that I can find, but the site has been cached recently. I have had this trade for a very long time.

http://www.freesexlifestyle.com/ - site has been online since 2004. There is no PR on the index page, but a few pages in the site have PR. There is also NO cache of the index page.

|huh

To use those two examples
The second one seems to have some linking issues using www. vs not using www - but definitely not banned by Google - they have 340 pages including the index page listed

The first one looks like a similar issue - and again Google has most of their pages indexed - they do have either a programming error thats causing some dupes in frames or something on their server side not working correctly but other than that they are not banned either.

Both sites have a cache date for their index pages within the last week so Google is obviously botting them pretty well

In the years since Google started I have only seen one link list actually get banned - and that was due to some log spamming they were doing - and we all pulled links to them and no ill effects to anyone else

Do you know if they were zeroed before this latest pr update?

If they were zeroed by the last update, there's always the possibility that it's an artifact of the update, and they'll be back to normal next one.

If they were zeroed before, and didn't recover from the update, that would be more likely to be a sign google has decided there's something wrong with the site.

With links that old, if you thought the link was a good one before, I'd be inclined to wait one more update before deciding.

It might be worthwhile to contact the owner of the other pages and ask them if they know what happened.

You gotta talk to them anyway - dropping links without notifying the other guy is a risky thing to do, it can damage your reputation as a linker.

Any thoughts on why they may have lost pr Linkster?

It was clear they weren't banned - which leaves the question of "are they devalued somehow, and therefore risky to link to?".

Bill - I have no way of seeing the PR :) I would assume that its related to the problems that Google has been having with the PR display in the toolbar over the last two years - noticed some people complaining of the same thing on another board about their sites - and eventually it came back

I know you can't know, man, nobody can know. ;-} I was asking for your best guess.

Which sounds like the same as mine - If I had to say, my first choice would be "probably an artifact", by which I mean a peculiarity in the way the toolbar is displaying apparent pr.

Or a product of the internal linking or stucture of the domain - I didn't check to see if there was pr on the index if you typed out domain.com/index.html as opposed to just using the trailing slash.

You already mentioned possible problems with the structure of one of them - maybe leading to a canonical pages selection on googles part that took the pr off the index.

Which still leaves the question of "Is there a risk in linking to the page?".

I still end up with, if you aren't sure it was zeroed before this last pr "update", wait one more update to see if it's pr is restored. And notify the link trader so they can check their structure.