What does concern me slightly though is the lack of pagerank assigned to any of these blogs. In 80% of the cases, a gray pagerank bar – even though the blogs have pages indexed, and are returned in search results for certain keywords.

I’m sure they’re not banned, but in some cases the blogs are almost 2 years old, and still gray pagerank. I’m wondering if the fact that they are blogs is significant here. Most blogs would be a sub domain name of the ‘host’ site (yourblog.wordpress.com), and perhaps any pagerank is improving the main site??

Pagerank is something I continually tell myself not to be concerned with, but the gray bars do worry me sometimes. The blogs are obviously indexed and should be all white pagerank at the very least.

Notice it’s actually marked as a Supplemental Result. They are not that common to see when searching every day and generally only appear when searching on very specific and unsual keyword terms / combinations.

The supplemental index IS NOT the additional results you see after you click on the following link in Google…

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 43 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

…these are just “Additional Similar Results”.

Supplemental indexed pages are marked as being “supplemental” in the actual search results next to the specific listing. If they are in the supplemental index then that’s where they remain (unless heavily modified).

And more often than not, given that they are in the supplemental index for a reason, they’re going to show up as supplemental for pretty much all keyword terms a user could search on to find them anyway (i.e. they’re suffering from duplicate content issues which means someone else with the same content IS showing in the primary index and beating them for the same search terms and traffic).

Correct me if my theory is wrong but aren’t sites that are in the supplemental index in that supplemental index for whatever specific term you typed in? In other words, for another search query they may not be in the supplemental index. So in reality your link would be counted the same as any similar type of link.