The growing grey of toolbar 3

[Wail]

I've posted about Google's beta toolbar 3's tendency to show a grey bar for sites with (we assume) healthy PR. Forgive me but I can't find the original post.

It's been a few weeks since the latest PR update and I swear I'm seeing more and more of the greybar too. I've even heard some SEOs talk about the "greybar penalty" but I suspect this is just a sales ploy to naysay those SEO sites which suffer from it.

I'm sure the toolbar 3 "greybar" isn't indicative of a penality. The latest profile site I've spotted with a greybar is Jeremy Zawodny's blog page. That's quite unusual too; normally it's the home page which suffers and PageRank returns in the deep pages (though I've seen deep pages who went from PageRank to greybar since the PR update).

Has anyone else noticed the greybar increasing in occurrence since the PageRank update last month?

[mcanerin]

I'm sure the toolbar 3 "greybar" isn't indicative of a penality.

I'm pretty sure, too. The toolbar will show a greybar if it can't contact the PR server, for one thing - which is out of step with the other indexes.

In the old days (listen to me, talking about "the old days" on something less than 2 years ago! :rolleyes: Things move fast on internet time...) when we had fairly regular "googledances" and they made a big difference in results, one of the first indications one was starting was the toolbar going grey for everyone.

You can also see it grey sometimes on a secure (https://) site and elsewhere. As your post implies, as long as the site itself is in the index and being ranked it's not an issue. Since the toolbar server appears to lag way behind the "real" PR, it's not even a good indication of future behavior.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the server was either busy doing some sort of update, or it's a simple connectivity issue.

Ian

[Wail]

Thanks Ian,

The grey bar due to lack of contact with the server is the logical answer. I see it all the time on https sites where the additional data contact is impossible in the secure system.

I'm really focused on those pages which persistently have a greybar in toolbar 3, though. Day in and day out. The number of those seem to have increased.

[telNform]

No offense, but I am still amazed at how many people are still being consumed by the Google Toolbar PR function ... Google has stated it is not accurate ... others have referred to it as "Pigeon Rank" - i like that analogy

Scott
telNform

[Wail]

Ah... this is why I nosed around for my original post on the subject. In my first thread I explain I don't care about PageRank. I'm more curious about the mechanisms and working of Google.

For example, if the greybar only occurs when it can't contact Google's server then here's a big difference between toolbar 2 and toolbar 3. Either toolbar 3 uses a different data centre and either that data centre is harder to reach or has incomplete information or toolbar 2 has access to an extra level of caching.

It's also worth noting that many of the Google European fronts are advertising the toolbar these days and the graphics show the PageRank image. PageRank is a commodity for Google, they invented and people (as you've pointed out) gobble it up.