Hi, I hope that someone here can answer my question.

A friend of mine has had a commercial website for over 2 years. He has been unhappy with its Google placement and I have been montoring it for the last 3 months. During that time, the highest ranking it has achieved for his 3 target phrases (which are not popular, but quite specific to his business) is 127. Most of the time, the site has not been in the top 250.

Two days ago, he decided enough was enough and he gave the company 1 month's notice of his intention to move the site to another company. They persuaded him to let them have another shot at SEO. This morning, the site has mysteriously leapt to #3 or higher in his 3 phrases. None of the code appears to have changed and the backlinks don't appear to have increased.

Unfortunately, I can't give more details as the current web company is being rather awkward.

Can anyone shed any lighht on how this company may have achieved this remarkable leap and whether it is likely to be ethical? More importantly, how permanent is it likely to be.

Many thanks and sorry to be so vague...

who knows.

Do take note however that an update is in progress at google and maybe some other sites have dropped, But it sounds like he should be sacking the company anyway. If they can't rank for specific, not very competitive phrases what can they manage to do ?

probably they have placed some links but as google has not updated the links you cannot see them in the link command but google has them in the algo the most updated. Try using the linkdomain command of yahoo to get idea about the backlinks. If anything has shooted up in Ggoogle then it has to have some additional backlinks if nothing on site has changed as you said.

did i hear right...Do take note however that an update is in progress at google..
i though we just had an update a month ago..does this explain the sudden pr0 on all websites?including yahoo?

there are updates happening all the time some have more visible effects than others. The toolbar PR guesstimate display being off (hopefully for ever) is a different issue altogether.