Dan Crow, Googles director of crawl systems was a guest speaker at the third SEMNE event. Read the lowdown at
Getting Into Google in the latest HighRankings Advisor newsletter.

a couple of quotes;

In terms of what the crawler looks at on the page, he said there are over 200 factors, with “relevance” playing a big part in many of them.

PageRank:

Dan also discussed the importance of PageRank (the real one that only Google knows about, not the “for-amusement-purposes-only” toolbar PR that many obsess over). He let us know that having high-quality links is still one of the greatest factors towards being indexed and ranked, and then he proceeded to explain how building your site with unique content for your users is one of the best approaches to take. (Now, where have you heard that before? He explained how creating a community of like-minded individuals that builds up its popularity over time is a perfect way to enhance your site.

Chris,

Thanks for the link...

For those that may not take the time to read the entire article, here's another interesting quote:

Lastly, Dan mentioned that Google still isn’t doing a great job of indexing content that is contained within Flash and/or AJAX. He said that you should definitely limit your use of these technologies for content that you want indexed. He provided a bit of information regarding Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR), and explained that when used in the manner for which it was intended, it’s a perfectly acceptable solution for Google. Dan said that Google does hope to do a better job of indexing the information contained in Flash at some point in the future.

Really good information which some of us are not aware of.