Has PageRank Completely Diverged From Indexing?

I noticed something today which I had heard vaguely in the past as occurring but no hard evidence was ever presented: A banned site with PR. Some of you may be rolling your eyes and saying â€Å”oldnews.com” but for those of you still with me read on, I think it deserves some analysis. This is especially true for those of you still clinging to traditional SEO. This means you link builders.

My hypothesis: PageRank has nothing to do with SERPS

Example: There is a site out there that I know has been banned by Google. This site was submitted for a re-inclusion and has, to this point, been denied. The ban occurred as all others have in the past. Pages vanished from the index and the PR flat-lined. After several months of zero progress a completely new home page was created and all the connecting pages orphaned. It was essentially turned into an advertisement for another related site in order to maintain click-through and other search engine traffic. Recently I was looking over some old reports, and other various metrics, and stumbled across the site again. For old times sake I brought it up to have look. I stared in amazement as a PR 5 stared me in the face. Until recently the saying has been â€Å”If it has PageRank it’s not banned.” So I began to dig a little more into the site. I accessed the typical Google operators: no cache and no indexed pages at any of the datacenters. What really caught my attention was the 107 back-links Google registered for the site. So much for being entirely off the map. So here we are with a PR 5 site that is banned. What gives?

1. PageRank has nothing to do with indexing (by reverse logic; as a banned site should not have a say in the â€Å”authority” of another site)
2. PageRank only helps if your site is not banned. (PR is treated differently in certain cases)
3. Being linked to from a banned site is good as the PR still conveys.
4. Even kudos from a baby bunny killer is a good thing
5. Google has a sick sense of humor.

Relevant information: So you say â€Å”Just because a banned site has PR doesn’t mean that PR doesn’t assist SERPS anyway.” Well another interesting thing is also happening. If you do some simple searches for a highly competitive term, lets say â€Å”Viagra” you’ll notice most if not all of the spam sites have fallen off the edge and the results page is now populated with a the â€Å”old crew.” The key here is OLD. There seems to be a lot of emphasis towards older, pre-Florida update, domains. Doorway pages anyone? Does age preclude PR? Certainly these pages don’t necessarily have more back-links than the spam sites but do rank far better. This it self deserves some more analysis but it is quickly becoming clear that age is a dominant factor for Google ranking and linking is falling to the way side.

Conclusions: Page Rank and SERPs are either separated (as we all have suspected) or completely divorced. Page Rank is moving into its own little world, and sites are being registered by Google despite their banishment. One could also argue that PageRank should be renamed to â€Å”Link-O-Meter.” And finally a site may be gone but it’s not forgotten. Big brother is watching.