From a recent PR update or something like it, it seems that Google is trying to tweak it’s PR algo.

Many new sites are popping up with high PRs while others sites that should, according to previous expectations, go up in PR stay dormant or drop dramatically. From all these changes recently it is pretty obvious that Google is tweaking and testing their new PR algo, which seems to be heading in a bit of a different direction from the old.

From what I have seen on my sites and some others that have reported on webmaster forums it seems that the premature algo is putting more emphasis on “crawlibility” (quoting Matt Cutts), deep linking, and new content. Blogs, forums, and sites that are updated often with mass amounts of pages of content are getting higher rankings while older smaller sites are staying the same or dropping, which could lead me to believe that Google is quite aware that webmasters are the main audience of the PR, and that they hold a somewhat superficial control over some webmaster by being able to control it, so maybe…they are just trying to get what they want: more pages, cleaner pages, and more often.

So while I think all linking theory will still hold up, as it is the only way to determine a sites popularity, I think Google is starting to put a lot more emphasis on cleaner large content sites, bot-candy, and the new PR number will be a representation of it.

So what is this mean?
For one thing I think the sand-box is definitely dead.

What might have caused this drastic change?
Well I think Google noticed how MSNs algo was getting pretty good, like many others on the web, and their apparent emphasis on fresh content might have swayed Google to ditch the sand-box and other nuances dealing with age.

All this is nice, but lets just hope Google doesn’t make a mess out of this one, the first taste of this new algo has been quite bitter, even with rises.