This Google grey toolbar thing is interesting.

It appears more and more as though this is some sort of smokescreen by Google on pages they have flagged for some reason or other we may never know.

What pages with greybar do isn’t so much of a mystery, we’ve been studying and watching the toolbar’s antics very closely on our own test site for more than a year now and so have a good idea of how these pages actually behave..

..It’s why, there seems no coherent theory on what might cause it..

We have a variety of pages on the main site seoibiza.com that are affected, in various ways:

• Some have stayed persistently grey from the start
• Some have regularly alternated between Greybar and PR4
• Some have been PR4 all the way through and only recently gone greybar

It also appears to be entirely unconnected to SERP performance. The pages are all indexed, and they rank, in fact some rank extremely well.

Some of them have always been alternating between PR3 – 4 and greybar, but in the last couple of weeks pages that have always been a solid PR4, and that rank top 5 in reasonably competitive SEO searches have also suddenly gone grey.

Their SERP positions have remained completely unchanged though.

There are various theories <<–2 links  – on this phenomena, all of which could be possibilities, and none of which seems to fit uniformly in all our cases.

The main ones seem to center around the possibility of the affected pages being identified as potential link exchange pages. We have only one likely candidate that might fit this profile (even though there’s no link exchanging going on there whatsoever) our “resources” page which has always been greyed out, right from site launch.

However, as documented back in Dec here we know this page is not real PR zero, it briefly flashed to a toolbar PR4 for a month or so a little while back, at which point we tested a link from it live on the (previous incarnation of) the SEOers forum, www.davidcastle.org and it proved fairly potent until they shut down the old site and 301′d everything to the new one.

So Google are basically choosing to just switch the PR display off on these pages for whatever reason.

Much like the toolbar-but-not-SERP-PR-Penalties that affected linksellers and pay per posters a while back.

But the majority of pages affected  on our site  are static content, and are not really looking like link exchange type pages at all.  They’re all (bar one) in the main nav, and are mostly quite well-linked from body text too.

Speculating is fairly pointless as there’s too much experimenting going on all at once round here, but it’s piqued our interest now, so we’re going to spend the next few months trying to develop the equivalent of M Theory for the Google greybar disease (and thereby save the world from this plague of pestilence) in our spare time.

Ibiza out.