I look at some of my competitors' sites that have higher PR than mine: I have thousands of backlinks, they have fewer than 50; I have thousands of pages with legitimate good content, they have a few crappy pages; my site's been around for years, theirs has not; and I *know* I get a lot more traffic. So what am I missing? Stuck at 5...(pre-Florida was a 7)
visible PR isn't accurate, and hasn't been updated regularly for quite some time. keep in mind though, that PR is just a means to an end in most cases. that end being lots of traffic from google. if you've got the traffic but not the PR, don't worry about it. if you don't have the traffic, then, well, there are more important things to be doing than worrying about your PR
As far as I understand it, PR is based on the PR of the page(s) linking to you. I don't think that has changed at all. One PR 8 link will distribute more PR than thousands of PR 1 and 2 links. I don't know what kind of links you or your competitors have, but the 'amount' of backlinks isn't necessarily what matters for PR. It's good for anchor text though, providing they have linked to you with the anchor text(s) you want. If you want the green bar to move along though, you need to get one good high ranking link pointing your way. The quality of your content has always been irrelevant to calculating PR, apart from the fact that it helps in getting backlinks. After all, how is a bot to know that you are writing 'good quality' content? As disgust says though, the traffic is more important and if you are outranking your competitors in the search terms you're after, then you're still winning!
As I contemplate the concept that the only way to attain a high PR is to be linked from a higher PR, I am reminded of the immortal words of Maximilian Schell from the great cinema classic The Black Hole: "Some cause must have created all this; but what caused that cause?"
Hehe. I like this quote! What caused the cause is that every page started with a fixed (and very very tiny) amount of PR. Now, with every link, PR started to accumulate at the recieving end. If a site has 3 Million links pointing to it, it has now a very high amount of PR transferred to it (in addition to that TINY bit he had on startup, which is negligibly small compared to what it got due to links!). I hope this is what you actually was asking about!
The same as it always was but as one of the many factors in the Google ranking algorithm its relative importance has been diminished over time. Calculating PR is an iterative process so in practise it doesn't matter what PR value you initially atribute to a page before performing the calculations, it can even be zero. - Michael