Unexplained Google PR Increases and Decreases?

[roxer]

Hey guys pretty much what I'm looking to do is try and find/collect researchable reasons to help me explain an increase or decrease in PR.

So far I've tried researching the following possible explanations as to why a site's PR would increase or decrease with all my results coming up inconclusive (for my site).

1) Backlinks (I used Site Explorer)
- Increase or Decreases in Backlinks
- The PageRank of these backlink and whether or not they are nofollowed
- Researched relevancy of Backlinks to the pages themselves.

(For me, all results were inconclusive in this area as my pages whether PR1 or PR5 had a VERY similar if not equivilent backlink profile.)

2) Site Traffic (Google Analytics)
- Increases or Decreases within the time frame from the previous PR Update to the Current Update

3) Changes Made to Pages
- Research any possible changes to on-site within the time frame from the previous PR Update to the Current Update

4) Page Speed
- Researching the Google PageSpeed Score for each page (not sure if Google started implementing this yet or not, but I figured it couldn't hurt.)

5) Social Media Mentions
- Using a couple tools I've tried researching the number of times certain pages or products were mentioned on Social Media websites (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.)

6) Product Conversions
- Using Omniture I checked to see whether and increase in conversions could have possibly resulted in an increase in PR.



(I personally know this is a bit extreme, and Toolbar PR shouldn't be used as more than a thermometer, but its one of those things that has to be explained to higher ups.)

Do any of you guys go through such extremes to try and explain increases or decreases in PR, and if so are there any other options you think I should try?

[w3bmaster]

People waste time with something worthless like PR
It's just a number nothing more
All that counts are RANKINGS =? traffic

PR and RANKINGS are 2 diffrent things and have like no connexion ...