PR - SERP's - Adult Caps

I read many opinions here on the forums, some of which are convinced that Google's algo doesn't consider PR. I've also read here that Google caps PR for adult sites. If the latter is true it seems that the only rationale for it being so is that the former is false.

Sorry for the delay in replying, I read this a few days ago but couldn't really come up with any sort of a useful reply... I have been thinking about it ever since!

There is no doubt that google caps pr for adult sites but it seems to go deeper than that...
It does seem that certain non-adult sites can use adult terms with impunity whilst others get drilled by google the moment they add the word 'adult'... those that are 'permitted' (cnn, abc, bbc, etc) have only to mention an adult term in an article to achieve top 50 rankings against millions of optimised competitors with hundreds of relevant backlinks!

The relevance of pr in determining serps is one heck of a mystifying phenomenon... on the one hand it seems like there is no connection and yet if there isn't... what the heck else does pr do?

On balance it seems pretty certain that pr is used in the calculation but how/where/when is beyond me...
I'm sure there are people here who have a good understanding of the 'how/where/when' and I surely do wish they would 'share the love' ;)

There are some staggeringly illogical serps right now (ever since Florida they seem to have gotten less easy to understand by the month) if you check the current #1 listing for the daddy of all adult keywords (p...o...r...n - without the dots) and compare it to the #2 listing (which has been #1 for the last 2 years - until this month), I would dearly love for somebody to tell me how that site could achieve it's #1 listing:
It has lower pr.
Almost all of it's (paltry number of) backlinks are internal.
It's external backlinks are not at all relevant for the keyword.
No sign of any anchor text utilising this keyword.
No 'real' adult content, just a bunch of silly pictures which could contain anything so far as google knows!
He's even selling links based on his adult traffic - gained from this listing!
It has only one adult link going offsite and that goes to a domain which tries to install adware.
(Because of the adware connection I reported both sites to google some months ago - with no effect)!

The #2 listing on the other hand has a huge number of backlinks - not only on it's main page but on hundreds of it's internal pages too and they all have much better relevance than the backlinks to the #1 listing; plus it is quite well optimised with some "high pr" doorway pages.

This sort of thing makes it seemingly impossible to unravel the mysteries of serps and pr and any possible connection imho and is the reason I spend so many sleepless nights pondering the mysteries of seo and wondering if I will ever really understand them

Clicky, Thanks for the reply. I don't have any adult sites but could think of no other rational reason that Google would cap PR for them unless PR was part of the algo (which many here feel it is not).

As you said much of that I see makes no sense either. Maybe we'll get someone who's convinced that PR's not part of the alo to share a rational explanation of why this is so.

Thanks again.