One of our users (Al Toman) posted a comment about his observation of some cookie cutter sites moving from PR0 to PR4 while sites with valuable good information "dropped outta site".

Hi Noel, I'm new at this, so probably can't decipher too much. I read and read and read about this SEO thingy and just got more confused so I figured that I'd test it out for myself. The web pages that are cookie-cutter dupes of worthless information went from a zERo PR to a 4PR. The web pages that sport popular keywords that I picked off of Overture but have absolutely zero worthy content on them ALL went from a zERo PR to a 4PR. Most all the web pages that have VALUABLE GOOD INFORMATION dropped outta sight~! So, now I think I know what this SEO thingy is all about. I'll remove the worthy web pages and add more garbage but Google desired web pages and the site over all should beef up quite well if Google continues to follow its tail. I created a php script that gives me the pr's of all the sites' pages in one table for analysis. I don't care if the site goes South, it's up just for gathering info on Google, mostly. "Oh what fun ..." Kind regards,
Al Toman

There are 2 different issues here. One is the computation of PageRank (PR) and another is google's ranking algorithm which determines whether you will be on google's top search results or not.

The computation of PageRank is not determined by the contents of the web page. It is determined by the number of incoming links or web pages linking to your web page.

If I have a web page called (www.test.com/helloworld.html) and all it says is "hello world from mr. golf" and I managed to have 100 websites link to my web page www.test.com/helloworld.html as compared to a second site called www.test2.com/golf.html where I have the best information about golf that you can read but there are no other websites linking to it, then my hello world web page would have a higher PR than the second webpage (golf.html).

When it comes to ranking, then that's another story. If the 100 websites that link to the helloworld.html also links to the second website golf.html then for sure the golf.html with the better content would be ranked higher.

Now here's the BIG QUESTION which is probably what you want to hear. Can a cookie cutter worthless information website out rank a website with valuable good information. The answer is a BIG YES.

In the above example, I believe there is a big chance that the helloworld.html will rank higher than the golf.html.

That is why google is constantly trying to find ways and adjust their algorithms to give the best search results for whatever keyword people are using.

Can people use SEO to rank their non-sense sites to a specific keyword, oh yes. Can other website owners who produces quality content use SEO to rank their websites, yes also. However, in the long run, as google refines its algorithm, we should be seeing less and less junk sites ranking high and more good content on the top results.