Sometimes, whatever you do and however you follow the webmaster guidelines, you just don’t understand the outcome from Google.
I just discovered that my blog has turned PR6. But it’s not the URL that I’ve always been using — i.e. http://www.yugatech.com/blog — that one is still PR5.
So which one is it? Check out the PR6 results for http://yugatech.com/blog/ here. All the rest — http://yugatech.com/blog and http://www.yugatech.com/blog/ remains at PR5 (mind the leading slashes). Now, how did that happen when is something I can’t understand myself.
So I say forget about PR.
Have a little trouble deciphering what you meant to point out, Abe. All the examples you seemed to type were the same. I’m not sure how you can add a ‘leading’ slash … all properly formatted URLs have two and only two, some people think that a trailing slash after a subdirectory such as mysite.com/blog/ versus mysite.com/blog makes a difference but it doesn’t really.
As far as the page rank changes I suggest everyone add http://www.mattcutts.com to their daily read … he has pointed out that Google is now putting out some daily PR changes compared to the monthly (or even less frequent) ones they were putting out.