There have been volumes written on the mysterious formula behind PageRank, so I won't explore that here, but I do believe I've found another piece to this puzzle.

It started about six months back, I began developing a small site for a client. It was not the best setup, for reasons beyond my control, the only development server, was the production server (Ugh!).

For the first 2 months, the only visitors to site to speak of were the client, his staff of eight, and myself. As I was primarily working on the server through Remote Desktop, I used the vanilla server install of Internet Explorer, sans Google toolbar. 3 months after launch, the site still had a PageRank of 0, besides a random stumbler, traffic was to this site was negligeable. Around this time, I was working on another web app for the same client, and the topic of PageRank came up. I instructed the client and his staff to install Google toolbar, with Advanced Features disabled (They work from a low speed DSL line, so I figured every little bit counts). Through work achieved on this project I was finally capable of seting up a somewhat more robust development environment.

As I was able to work remotely from my own workstation, not Remote Desktop, so I began viewing the initial site from my browser, which has the Google Toolbar's Advanced Features turned on. Within 2 weeks, to my surprise, the PageRank value of the site showed (1/10), although the traffic was still nothing to speak of. Out of curiosity, I contacted my clients office and requested that everyone browsing this site enable Advanced Features in their Google Toolbar. Less than 3 weeks later, the sites page rank was (4/10)

Now, I've actually been able to repeat this on 2 other sites, and I'm still paying around with the variables. I'm curious to know if anyone else has come across anything similar.

"The internet has become an ever evolving entity with sublte patterns that emerge if you know where to look."
-Me