See, the people who are freaking out over this update, and who have seen their sites bounce around, are the people who have used some sort of black-hat SEO. I understand that backlinks count towards PR (I have two PR5 sites, one PR6, and three PR4's), but (and I have the test results to prove this one), unthemed links on Google are no longer counted. This is why so many people have dropped in their SERPs. People who used straight white-hat tactics have seen that the Google datacenters are done with their updates. (For example, my site rankings had stablized 2 days into the Superbowl update, and have stayed static on all DC's since.) On top of that, some of my best sites (with multiple #1 rankings, and PR6) have less than 50 inbound links. Those links, however, are highly targetted. Another thing to remember, is use your keywords inside of your anchor tags. (allinanchor ranking improvements are major)
But, and I cannot stress this enough, good content is key. Here's some of the info from my logs that show how much Google, MSN, etc all love my site, and its content: (This is only Feburary05, nothing more)
MSNBot 25660 948.66 MB
Inktomi Slurp 19906 459.33 MB
AskJeeves 95065 11.23 GB
Googlebot 19735 649.97 MB
Good content, and no new backlinks for the site in 3 or 4 months. Yet when MSN launched I was sitting at #1 for all my keywords, and after the last update Google ranks are more in line in the MSN results.
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