Gray PageRank Bar

After Google launched the PageRank bar a couple of years ago it has become a standard for rating websites. Simply a higher PageRank means more inbound links and thus more people finding your website useful and necessary to link to, basically more votes. And higher PageRank also means that a link from your website counts as a more valued vote, making a link from your website extra interesting for a fellow SEO.

But, as PageRank became more and more important Google felt the need to add more elements to the otherwise simple PageRank calculation, to keep it fair. PageRank today not only depends on inbound links but also on; the amount of duplicate content, the quality of websites linked from a page, the amount of content, the age of a page and several other properties.

The individual effects of these properties can not always be easily observed as there are so many factors influencing PageRank. But, there is one way to get at least some insight into how Google has rated your page and this is through the Gray PageRank Bar.

What is a Gray PageRank Bar?

A gray PageRank Bar can sometimes be observed if you have a Google toolbar installed. Whenever a page has a PR of 0 and Google accepts your page but doesn’t think much of it, it will have a white bar. But, if the PageRank bar is gray the page Google may think something totally different of your webpage. There are several causes for a gray PageRank bar.

Not yet Indexed

The most common reason for a PageRank bar to be grayed out is that Google just has not indexed you page yet. His can be easily checked by typing in the URL of the webpage in Google. If no results come up, you’re okay and you should submit your page to Google, update your Google Sitemap or just wait for it to be indexed if you’ve just recently added the page to your website. If the page does show up in Google you’ve got a different problem and you should continue reading this article.

Banned

Another common reason for a page to have a grayed out PageRank bar is when Google has decided to ban the webpage. This may be due to a page performing some Black Hat technique like, cloaking, using hidden text or keyword stuffing. But other causes like using duplicate content and linking to bad neighbourhoods have also been reported. If your page has been banned illicitly or you have resolved the issue you can contact Google to have your page removed from the ban list.

Supplemental Results

A third and new reason for a page to get a gray PageRank bar is for being a supplemental result. Supplemental pages are still ‘respected’ by Google and thus add to your websites total Pagecount, but are not recognized as pages supporting your main content. They are basically seen as duplicate content within a website. I suspect Google added this factor as some websites were producing a huge amount of pages (sometimes, the same articles with just some words changed) to boost their Pagecount and their possibilities for internal PageRank voting (as each page counts for a vote, even if the PageRank is 0). A good example of a page de-emphasized due to being a Supplemental Result is: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9603/n_korea/. Supplemental pages are usually old, are short on content, spammy, not easily found and thus rarely viewed.

Requesting info from Google

A fourth and not well-known reason for Google to give a page a gray PageRank bar is when a page is used to request information from Google. Some pages have script to request information like PageRank, Search Engine results etc. from Google.com. Google recognizes this and awards pages like this a gray PageRank bar. This is probably done to reduce server load and to keep Google’s information for itself.

What can I do about a Gray PageRank bar?

This of course depends on the reason your page has been grayed out and on the purpose of the grayed out page. If your main page has a gray PageRank bar you have a serious problem as most webmasters will never link to you, because linking to grayed out pages may cause you own PageRank to drop. In other cases it may not be possible to get rid of the gray PageRank.

For instance, if your page is meant to collect data from Google.com you can’t do anything about it. Make sure you are not running a PageRank script on your home page to display your websites PageRank, rather use an include or use the SlowSEO.com PageRank Bar.

If your page is truly a supplemental result/page you could try to add content or alter the text to make it unique and renew it.
If your page has been banned try to solve the issue that’s causing Google to ban you and contact them.

And of course in the first case just wait patiently, like with many other SEO issues.