Part of the Google business plan is to make sure they change their algo often enough that nobody ever really figures out what the fuck will give you good positioning in the SERPS. I've always followed the advice of those more skilled than I at SEO to optimize my pages based on keywords relevant to my content and get relevant links, and it seems to work so far. PR doesn't necessarily mean anything when it comes to SERPS...I've got a couple ultra-targeted mainstream domains that are PR4 and only get a couple hundred SE hits monthly, mainly because they are ultra-targeted sites.
Also, the word on the street is that Google decided too many people were using toolbar PR as a means of putting a dollar value on links as well as otherwise paying way too much damn attention to it, so now toolbar PR reflects the actual PR at some point in history and not currently.
Just what I've heard and seen so far
