Last night and through early this morning, Google results were getting updated for both PageRank (PR) and BackLinks (BLs) for all of our clients, H2 SEO sites and for many other websites as noted by my counterparts around the world on SEO and Web Designer forums. This update was a rather significant change for some of the H2 SEO clients who are still in their infancy on the web. Changes caused sites with virtually no BLs listed on Google to jump to 40+ and PR values went from 0 to 4 and 5!
Many SEOs around the world noted on the forums that PR values have been on a roller coaster lately along with the rankings slipping. Examples of sites getting top rankings similar to their respective PR values in the outset slipped to almost random order between Google updates. Many of us are watching and waiting to determine of this gets "corrected" by the completion of the update or stays as a standard.
For those unfamiliar with PageRank...
From: http://www.google.com/technology/
PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
For those unfamiliar with Back Links...
From: http://www.computerdictionary.info/computer-term-details/Back-Links
Any and all links that you have coming to your website from websites outside of yours.
Of course there is so much more involved. Luckily, there are some really great people out there who help fill in the voids. That is why people come to technology geeks like us and why we spend countless hours developing solutions to make the business world on the web a bit better.