And Still Page Rank Confounds Me!!!

I was looking through my Compare Mortgage Rates site yesterday to see which pages were cached on Google and which had a page rank.

Most of the pages are cached, but with a grey bar. Which is strange - I always thought grey bar meant not cached on Google???

The home page and one other hold a very disappointing PR2 (was 5 a few updates ago). 14 pages are page rank 1, even though these are only linked to from the 2 PR2 pages. There's also a PR0 page that has not been touched or linked to for about 2 years!

The strange thing is that the main pages - those that are linked to from every other page on the website, are all grey barred (but cached). Whether my hosts have had some regular problem around the time of the page rank update that I was not aware of seems an unlikely explanation. More likely is the positioning of the links on the page.

I've realised that the links on every page to the main pages form a nice neat column. But those that Google seems to be following are a paragraph. The one PR2 internal page is not only in the column of links but also included in the text.

I've noticed on other sites using a similar layout that the home page is PR4, but the internal pages are not page ranked.

I'm starting to wonder if Google is trying to detect link exchanges by using some algorithm along the lines of if the link is on a line of it's own delimited by <br> then ignore it.

A lot of link exchanges would be detected this way and it would throw weight into proper links within text. And looking at various sites that link to a well performing site, not one is using the line break. But it means that internal links structures in a vertical format are penalised.

It's also interesting to note that the one links scheme that I notice always does very well allows the link to be placed mid paragraph.

It wouldn't fully explain all of the strange results I'm seeing, and another new site of mine (Promotional Gifts) seems to go against the theory. It has a very similar row of links, it's home page is PR3 and all but one of the 2nd level pages are PR2. Only 1 2nd level page is grey barred. Something else stands out about that link. But that's enough for today...

Your comments and observations are welcome. Please post a comment!