Since the update died ...

New sites being indexed immediately, but not ranking as high as I'd expect

[ARiaZ]

In the good old days of the dance, it may have taken up to a month to get indexed, but you had a fair idea where you would rank after the dance finished.

I have found over the last three months that new sites I have launched have been indexed (almost immediately) by Google, but have remained with a grey bar (or sometimes a PR0) ever since. These sites have enough incoming links of quality to be PR4 or more, yet they remain greyed out (or PR0).

The result is that a new site will be ranked 54 for a non-competitive keyword phrase, whereas the same site would have ranked Top 3 with it PR4 in the days of the Google Dance.

Has anyone else experienced this? Have sites that were added to Google before say April 2003 got a huge advantage over sites added since?