Google is messing with my head

I know Google is being wierd right now, but this has been going on since before the wierdness started. Hopefully one of you google gurus can figure this out.

I am trying to optimize my site, www.nsuforum.com, for the search terms northeastern state university.

Right now, www.nsuforum.com/index.php is #9. It has a toolbar PR 4. Google's cached version of www.nsuforum.com/index.php is an older version of the page before I tried optimizing by doing things such as adding title tags to links.

www.nsuforum.com has a PR of 5. It is indexed in google and the cached version shows the latest optimized version of the page. It does not show up in search results for my terms. (or if it does its waaaayyy down and I can't find it.)

Why does an unoptimized version with a lower PR (/index.php) rank better than the optimized version with higher PR ( / )? Mabye I got a little carried away with my link title tags. Does anything on the current version of www.nsuforum.com look like it could be considered spam by google?

Well at least your profits haven't fallen by 90% like has happen to Shawn on his site...