What is Grey PageRank

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

But, as PR because more and more important Google felt the need to ad more elements to the otherwise simply PR calculation, to keep it fair. PR 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 PR. But, there is one way to get atleast some insight into how Google has rated your page and this is through the Grey PR bar.

What is Grey PR?

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

1. NOT YET INDEXED:-

The most common reason for a PR bar to be greyed out is that Google just has not indexed your page yet. This can be easily checked by typing in the URL of the webpage in Google. If not 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 have just recently added the page to your website. If the page does show up in Google you have got a different problem and you should continue reading this article.

2. BANNED:-

Another common reason for a page to have a greyed out PR 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 cause like using duplicate content and linking to bad neighbourhoods have also been reported. If your page has been banned illicity or you have resolved the issue you can contact Google to have your page removed from the ban least.

WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT A GREY PAGERANK BAR:-

This ofcourse depends on the reason your page has been greyed out and on the purpose of the greyed out page. If your main page has a grey PR bar you have to a serious problem as most webmasters will never link to you, because linking to greyed out pages may cause your own PR to drop. In other cases it may not be possible to get rid of the grey PR. For instance, if your page is meant to collect data from Google.com you cant do anything about. make sure you are not running a PR script on your to display your websites PR, rather use an included or use the slow SEO.com PageRank Bar.

It your page is truely a supplemental result/page you try o ad 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 ofcourse in the first case just wait patiently, like with many other SEO issues.