Was wondering what are the factors that affect page rank? Also, the experiences of fellow hackers that caused your page rank to increase and decrease.
I know that's not the answer you wanted, but it's the truth. Lots of people have schemes. They might work for a little while, but Google figures them out and often punishes participants.
The best information can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...
In basic: Links to you from reputable sources help you. Having your pages have good content for users helps you. Doing anything to manipulate Google will hurt you eventually. Hiding things (like with CSS), trying to load up on keywords, duplicating content, and other sneaky things hurt you. Hiding content behind a registration or other thing a search engine can't do hurts you. Being browsable with a text browser helps you.
Google's software is advanced. If you put something in an H1, it will realize that it's important to your page. However, if you then resize it to 10px, it's likely to pick up that you're using H1s inappropriately as the Googlebot now grabs CSS as well.
And PageRank often isn't as important as other factors. For example, let's say you want users to find your site when they search for "blog". If people are linking to you with the line "There are cool accounts at [site name]!", that's not going to count much to the keyword "blog". However, if people are linking to you with "Get a [free blog] over at site name!" it'll help a lot more. The fact is that one doesn't care about PageRank so much as one cares about where they get placed in results for certain keywords.
Most of it is just common sense. If your site has compelling content, it will be seen positively. If it doesn't, it won't. It becomes harder and harder every day to fool Google. I suggest not trying. Best case, it boosts you for a short while. Worst case, you get delisted.
The basic factor is how important your site is. Important sites get higher PageRanks.
PR solves for your score (self consistently) by basically averaging out all the scores of everybody linking to you while coupling this with a (rather crude) model of user behavior. Of course, this is how it's described in the original paper and definitely very far from what actually goes on under the hood now a days.
It should also be noticed that several improvements on/replacements for PR have been suggested over the years, with:
TrustRank http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF
BrowseRank http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/tyliu/fp032-liu.p...
HITS http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf
being the better known ones. Alternatives usually revolve around improving the user behavior model (like including real traffic data in the calculation http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/fil/Papers/click.pdf ), but there is still a lot of work to be done in this field (there's couple of interesting papers coming out in WSDM09 and WWW09 about this).
The best way is to get highly credible sites to cover you. Time is taken into account (how long your domain has been up), the amount of content on your web site, how relevant your content is to a search query at the time, the amount of traffic you receive, amongst several other things that are more minuscule. You're best hope is to just do whatever you do really well so that it inspires people to talk about you.
Note: Link to PDF
http://blog.ask2link.com/case-study-advertisers-get-great-re...