I just saw that this site returns as the num 1 result for the keyword "free movies": http://thepiratecity.org/ I checked it's PR which is 3 according to this and several other pr checking sites: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php I have a site that is also PR3 (has nothing to do with illegal movies btw), and I target a much less competitive keyword than "Free Movies". So how come my site shows up on pages much further down and sites like these with the same PR show up on page 1???
PR is one of 200 factors in google. PR is not the "be all, end all" of seo also their site might have better SEO than yours. For the site you named, a google search for their domain in quotes gives
Yeah PR isn't everything along with the fact Google has been awarding and removing PR randomly lately.
Maybe they have an increase in backlinks and new content for other keywords that ranked. hence the return.
The reason for this maybe because this site must be old and has more than 2500 pages indexed in google. It also has some valuable backlinks. ANd above all they must be having a proper SEO plan to execute for their site. Check for all these factors and then compare it with the pagerank of both sites, you will get the results.
I do ignore the importance of Google Pagerank (PR) since 1.5 years ago after seeing many evidence of "PR and SERPs has no relation anymore". Google just handle of abused in PR from webmasters around the globe. They do adjusted PR to make sure it will not be used for website indicator anymore.
PR is NOT everything in SEO. Like vagrant said, it's one of the factors that Google takes into consideration to determine SERP.
Page rank doesn't make any sense to me... This is a domain that I used to have a mountain bike site on: http://www.bear-rs.com/ I forgot to renew it and someone else bought and stuck a crappy holding page on it nearly 3 years ago. It's still gor page rank 3 in Google? Doesn't make any sense to me . . . Ste