Websites I Didn't Optimize did better than the sites I've been optimizing. Strange

First off, we all know that PR really has nothing to do with SERPS. (I say this to avoid the obnoxious folk on DP who post short comments like "PR doesn't matter..focus on linkbuilding" crap).

Anyway, I have websites all over the place. We have about 30,000 cars listed on websites that are separated by state. Each city is then broken down to a subdomain (which has been working great- considering subfolders are better)

The sites I have been focusing on for the past 3 months only shot up one point. Two sites that I don't even use (but do have content) shot up to a PR 5.

The PR also flowed well to some internal pages (even some really deep ones). I'm not saying the sites I juiced up did bad, the serps are great. This is just another good example of how Pagerank really doesn't matter.
The sites I juice do to awesome in the serps, but have a lower pagerank than the ones I don't juice up.

 

Any changes you have made on SEO purpose, both on-page and off-page will cause your site bounced in ranking. However, if you have done it properly with whitehat then the ranking would be bounced back with a better than before. It does take times before giving a judge I did not say your ranked well site with no optimized is bad. But you will have to do SEO on them one day when competitor climbing up and over you.