ok so if you run a search on “tocco pizza chicago”
you see their reviews etc but then you see a Rip Off Reports which is in the 5th position and that was posted today. It has no PR according to PR Checker and yet it is above a site with a PR of 3. So does PR even mean anything anymore?
PR has always been only a small part of the equation. And because it’s importance has been blown way out of proportion (and abused by SEO kiddies) it is becoming a much smaller part of the equation.
so then how do they get up there so fast?
That site is coming up where it does not so much because of that specific set of keywords but because it’s the site it is
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A+www.ripoffreport.com
In addition to what has been posted above about the general irrelevance of PageRank, the PageRank that you can see in the Google Toolbar is not the real PageRank. The Google Toolbar-PageRank can be several months old, and is only an indicator and not the real PageRank.
Popular sites are indexed by Google many times a day, and new pages might be listed within minutes. CNN and BBC news stories on current events frequently rank in the top-ten results, ahead of long-standing articles on the subject, only to disappear from the top-ten after some time. In casu, SitePoint currently ranks number three for the phrase ‘tocco pizza chicago’ 
and that means what exactly?
so how is it determined that ripoffreports or sitepoint is a “popular” site?
Easy. Lots of high-quality links to the sites and lots of high-quality contents that’s updated frequently.
i wouldn’t say rip off reports has high quality content exactly. but i thought linking to other sites hurts your site?
Well, a lot of people seems to think so, since they link to the site.
but i thought linking to other sites hurts your site?
Certainly not. What would give you what impression?
In fact, I’ve read that linking to a popular site may even help your site. So many concern themselves over getting backlinks that they forget about the benefit of outlinks.
Just to illustrate the point being made, if you search for “tocco pizza chicago” (with the speech marks), this thread ranks number 2. If you remove the speech marks this thread vanishes off the radar.
That’s because Google can’t argue that this thread should rank highly for the exact phrase in that order because there are hardly any pgaes on the web that fit the same criteria … but… do the same search without the speech marks, ie.e anyof those words in any order with anything inbetween them and Google kicks into ‘most helpful’ mode and starts returing pages that it thinks are more relevant and here’s the kicker, it must be using other signals than just the keyword in the search to decide how useful those pages are, get me? As Mittineague said.
but they didn’t link to that page specifically or that doesn’t matter?
If the site has a good internal link structure, the external links to the specific page are less important.
is there a guide for a good internal link structure?
Yes, do what works best for your human users.
what exactly does that mean? the site has all links that are displayed the same through the entire site. we got links on each specific page that are related to the matter displayed there only.
Which site are you comparing to?
I think another key factor in a site getting indexed quickly is that it have new content often and regularly. For example, SitePoint is very active so for Google to keep up it needs to be crawled almost continuosly. Since PR is always “late”, content with no PR may show up in the top results.
You asked if there was a good guide for internal link struture and the answer is that if you arrange your internal architecture in the best configuration for your human users, you’re doing what the search engines want too.