Eric Johnston wrote:

> John Bokma wrote:
>> Eric Johnston wrote:
>>
>>> XX edited above: now reads "gives grey PR for 5% of pages" (not
>>> sites)
>>
>> But only for 5% of *your* pages? Or in general?
>
> Sorry for the typo.
>
> It was about 5% of the pages on my web site. say 6 quite specific
> pages out of say 115. Always the same 6 pages and all the time grey
> for 3 days, until I renewed the toolbar when all went green
> immediately.
>
> On two other sites I examined, a similar 5% proportion of pages had
> gone grey and these also returned to green at the same time I renewed
> my toolbar as above.

Yours, or just random?

> When I renewed my toolbar I selected a different
> country or something as compared with before.
>
> I think the toolbar pulls the PR from one of several PR servers and
> that the old toolbar was pulling from a PR server with incomplete
> database.

That would mean that a zillion people would have that problem, and
Google would notice that.

> The home page of the dodgy site has since gone green again, thank
> goodness, but I still disapprove of their site and don't really like
> linking to it. Do you know how to write a simple reliable javascript
> link that stops Google following a link to such a dodgy site yet
> allows my visitors to get to their rather interesting and valuable
> information ?

Yup, see:
<http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html>

simple: <a href="...." rel="nofollow">...</a>

Note that if people are going to use this a lot it will mean the death
of PR etc.

--
John Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Get a SEO report of your site for just 100 USD:
http://johnbokma.com/websitedesign/seo-expert-help.html