I've never really been experienced enough to really care about SEO or PRs until just recently.. For the last couple of months I've been putting my company website into multiple directories, as well as working on optomizing every page on the site with quality content and proper tags. This website is a page rank 3. Now I created another website, didn't care much about good SEO while building the page as it was more of a fun project to pass time in the summer. Never once submitted it to a directory. This site is a page rank 4. Whats up with that? If you're curious to see the site I'm talking about its www.tutorialforge.com -- It's pretty much abandoned as I don't really have any interest in running it. I'm just curious if its something I did differently or is it just that the page rank algo is a bit random?
i bet nobody can tell exactly how PR algo works (except google self). whatever SEOs are commenting its based on their observations. till few months back it was observed that PR is based on no. back links to the site or URL. but recent some examples are there like yours have got better PR without having much backlinking. your site is about tutorials, posting regular news updates made bot to found it more useful than your previouse site. resulting site has about 6000 cached pages. back linking from these pages will also have large impact of your home PR this seems google is paying more attention to relavant links (you had only one link from photoshop tutorial site) and content is playing imp role in PR. this is my conlusion (on my observations and readings). may be senior members on this forum would give some authentic obsevations.
mitchandre -- I never once added tutorialforge to a single directory or worked on building solid backlinks but I have for some time with my other website. This is why I was a baffled. Thanks for your response daredashi. Do you think I could harness this for my own benefit and implement more news updates and some useful tutorials on my other site?