Perhaps for those who watch these things we should keep a thread like this around.
This morning, the number of inlinks (or back links in Googlespeak) seems to have increased by a factor of 2 1/2. For my website the link:http://www.mysite.com calculation has gone from 620 to 1570.
What I am finding is that while I am seeing the PR on many pages within sites I work on, their rankings aren't changing much, as this is looking like it just may be the PUBLIC display of a PR that has been around for a long time.
Matt Cutts over at Google, mentioned that there would be a sizeable increase in backlinks when Google's Bigdaddy was finished. And it just finished not too long ago.
There's definitely new weirdness going on - my new site, which is sandboxed, had been climbing nicely in allinanchor to about 5th for my main keyword. About a week ago, it disappeared entirely (isn't in the top 1000) for allinanchor for that phrase. Inner pages in the site show up about 30th or so for allinanchor. Visible BL in Google haven't changed. I assume this too shall pass....
I was thrown about 10 minutes ago, but it looks like I'm not alone with the wierdness. I have a site that is about a month and a half old and out of the blue has a PR4! I thought maybe I somehow dragged a shadow of PR in from another site... And what really threw me was I was in my private forum on a sub-domain... which is protected by aMember and I saw the PR... Went to the home page and sure enough.
Which actually... Now that I think about it is rather strange. I have the index redirect on the sub-domain to the private forum log in... So... Google's giving me PR to a forum in a protected directory.
And on top of that, it's site wide! All I've done is link from one of my blogs and a few other of my sites.
Luckily though I have the sense to know; it means nothing from a traffic perspective; but it's sure pretty to look at.