I just started trying to find out the PageRanks for my website and I was amazed by what I found...

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

- source http://www.google.com/technology/

The above is all well and good but I have noticed something strange in regards to my website:

1) All of the pages in my blog are PR 0.
2) Some of the pages on my main site (where I sell software) are also PR 0 but some are PR 3.
3) All of the pages on my old Maul site are PR 3. I have since incorporated those pages into my main (software) site where they are all PR 0 now.

This is quite confusing to me...

My blog has only been around for about 3 months but I have received well over 200K uniques in that amount of time.

When I search to see how many sites are linking to me via Google I get a number of 36. Which is also strange as only last week I had something along the lines of 25K links coming in. The number also changes to 44 if I use my blog as the search string.

Doing the same search via Yahoo nets me 85 inward links.

It would appear that Google has recently done something with their search indexing as even the very popular website Johnchow.com is showing a very low number of inward links as in only 190!

I'm still not sure why some of my pages show a PageRank of 3 while the rest show a PageRank of 0 but I think I may have hit on a bigger issue in that searching Google for sites linking in to your site has changed drastically recently!

Is anyone out there able to shed some light on this most interesting discovery?

At first glance I noticed that none of my "link:" results showed entries from Stumbleupon. In previous "link:" searches from Google I found a large amount of links from StumbleUpon, I don't know if there were 25K of them nor do I know if the removal of StumbleUpon links was intentional on Googles part. All I know is that my search numbers have changed drasticaly recently and I can't find any answers on Google's Webmaster blog.

After doing a little bit more research it looks as if Google has removed ALL social bookmarking sites from it's "link:" database!