What's up with Google?
 

It's finally showing me some top 10 love on some stuff I did months ago. Sites are all a year or more older, PR didn't change and in fact I don't think I've really changed those sites significantly in months either.

PR and SERP's have very little to do with each other

I traded my lawyer $1000 in SEO for his services and since December 1
I got him top 10 on google and yahoo for almost every keyword for a lawyer/attorney that he wanted.

The site has a PR 0 and had zero links on Dec 1, 2006. It got sandboxed
as soon as I started adding links and I checked today and it's out of the sandox.

He had a site already listed in Google with zero content and zero links
so I moved it to another host and set up a couple hindred pages of content and got about 6000 links via scripts and bam it worked !

The strange thing is live.com won't pick it up ?

I have a mainstream site getting 3,500 uniques a day that has an Alexa rating of 1,100,000 and then a site I started last week that is getting 5 hits a day has an Alexa rating of 1,200,000. I've stopped trying to figure it all out and just watch the traffic and income.

Given that sites with a high PR will show up for search terms that they have no info or specfic content or inbound links with appropriate anchor text just because they have the words on the page would tend to indicate your incorrect for the most part. But I'm not really going to argue the point since no one really agrees on this topic and there's no way to really "prove" the point.

I was wondering the same. On thier webmasters page, it shows some great PR for a few of my domains. Yet I check PR and its 0...Also, the other day 1 site showed 8800 pages indexed, now its 2. BIzzare.

google is playing with us...
i gave up on trying to understand them... i just keep optimizing (organic seo only) and hope for the best...

Let's hope Google can fix this problem soon.

google blows nuts this last 2 weeks or so...

well obviously eveything is theory as there is no google handbook. but for the most part i think he is right..

You will often notice site like myspace/google video / and youtube recently show up for terms just as you describe.. no inbound links . no specific content just one or 2 words that match.

This is because a pages relevence doesnt always directly correlate to the things you mention.. lots and lots of things to factor in...

the way i like to figure it is instead of trying to figure out what makes google tick , trick to think in terms of actual relvency like if you had to decide what page was more relevent without actually reading them.. how would you do it :)

I have noticed the same thing, too.