Well, I don't know if all of this is coincidence, but I wanted to share with you guys that my site is now #1 for my keywords this week, and last week it was no where to be found. Last week I submitted a press release at prweb.com and submitted a formatted sitemap to google sitemaps and I woke up this morning to a #1 rank. I also did a lot of SEO last week. With all these changes, I can't really pin point what the difference was.
Google has already stated that their sitemap program will not help your site rankings. It just helps them to find pages. Unless Google just did a backlink update, the PRWeb.com press release probably didn't so it. Is is a fairly new site that perhaps just emerged from the sandbox? If the answer is "none of the above" that leaves your SEO work or serendipity as the remaining choices.
I would say combination of everything you did... Visual representation of backlinks is just a sample of what google knows about so every backlink despite it not showing the link command gets weighed so prweb could have been part of it. The sitemap just allows google to crawl your site easier.. If they use offpage but onsite factors to determine page ranking then it could have determined that your site is an authority for which your page ranked number one for. My guess, your prweb news release got picked up by a few nice outlets.. This happened to me and caused a site of mine to go from the 30's to top 3. Congrats on the serp improvement..
Yeah, something people often confuse is visible updates and behind the scene updates. Google are crawling every day and every night, so their backlinks and consequently your PR and SERP ranking are also being updated constantly. They however don't choose to show you fresh updates of all their data on demand (probably because showing webmasters SEO info is a way distant objective to providing search to end users). Hence backlink "updates" and PageRank "updates" that SEO's hang out for. I'd say it was PRWeb, I've heard a lot of good things about using them. I think it's a vector every webmaster can't afford to ignore. I really like the whole "sliding scale" thing so everyone can afford to do at least *something* with them.
Google is always in flux and links are constantly being added and deleted. PR is constantly being affected by these changes.
I would have to say that the site has emerged from the sandbox. But did it just emerge from being in the sandbox for so many months, or did it emerge from the workings of the above post? I just found it very interesting, to say the least.
What kind of PRWeb submittal did you do, the free one or one of the pay ones? If you paid, how much? I did a free one and saw some decent results, but was always curious if paying would be beneficial to us..