I disagree. I put up a site, basically to act as a holding page. I have only a couple of links to it (from forum sigs) and it ended up with a PR 5 last update. I think its more complicated then just the backlinks theory.
So, what was the PR of the pages with the forum sigs. I'd be very surprised if PR had to to with anything other than the PR of incoming links. What are you suggesting? You can get a PR5 just by choosing the right words?? You don't need a lot of backlinks, just one good one will do.
here is one of the backlinks http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=64615&page=5 all of them are like this and they are about 20 total coming from maybe 3 sites. As I said they were forum sig links only. No directory listings anywhere. I only listed the sig links to get it spidered and was shocked to see the PR 5 last update.
I don't pay attention to the PR of a page that links to me, but I do pay attention to how the overall performance of the site looks.
I still think PR is by far not everything that counts, I have one site with PR 5 and for the most relevant keyword it ranks behind ~30 pages with a lower page rank, my site is the first with PR 5 all pages ranking higher are PR 4 and lower. They also have a lot less back links when I check it using various tools. So I don't know what else makes them position that good in SERPS.
Not really true. The average PR for all pages is supposed to be 1, but like wealth (and pretty much everything else dealing with living organisms) PR is exponentially distributed; the highest PR pages will bring the average up a lot. The median page in the index will have a PR of way less than 1. Some forums have a lot more PR to give out than people realize. Forums like this forum, SitePoint, SEOChat, and so on have high PR for their forum homepages. The main pages might be PR7; the category pages might be PR 5-6; and that thread "What didja do yesterday?" that you posted in might be a PR3-4 as long as its on the first page of results for the category page. Once these posts get old and knocked back into pages further removed from the home page, they might not mean much; but they might for a little while. Considering that some people have thousands of posts in these forums, that can be a substantial amount of PR to distribute to sig links.
Ok, I'm confused. The only sig link there that had a PR5 was the lincolnvscadillac site - and that is also linked to from DP, so not a great surprise. Or have you removed the link now? It's been about a week since the last post - the ranking went down one day during the week, but is now back up to a healthy 16.. hmm, maybe we can get on to the first page, considering that's what 1 backlink can do!!