Good, clean web design works best

[xur82]

It appears that Google has got it in for seo's..
My personal opinion is that with a low PR you can still achieve good results. Links are becoming less relevant unless they are quality. I'm in the process of removing some inbound links for my 30+ sites. Text specific terms linked are causing problems, still good for msn and yahoo but not google. I have a new, recently (2 months) uploaded site that obeys all the rules, nice and clean, (sorry I'm not adding the url) but this particular site has a PR of 3 with just 3 links to it. So obviously PR is not all about links..
A PR 0-3 site can still put you at the top of google for some very competitive phrases.
So, keep your site clean, keep it conforming, use a good url with title, keys, desc, robots, xml site map etc etc.. give google exactly what it wants, quality content with your key phrase maybe just twice in the page. Reciprocal linking could cause you problems too.
The seo business moves on, as does google..
Page 1 is not as hard as you think! Trying too hard can be detrimental to your results.

[z268]

i agree. google 've too much criteria.

[viradian]

How does reciprocal linking cause problems...?

[wmseo]

yep google has many things to consider and yes can get a good result with low pr