Ask Dave Taylor: Tech and Business

Monday

Paid for SEO but I still have PageRank 0?

New to the web, paid a company back in March to register my new website with all the search engines. As I am now reading your book (Growing your Biz with Google) in August, I see that my website has a 0 page rank! does this mean that I am not even registered with "Google"? Did I get ripped off?

If you could check and see if I am even in existence with Google and Yahoo, that would be great. If not, please tell me how I can fix this problem as fast as possible, as I am currently working on a "review website" with Microsoft Front Page 2003, that I plan on using to load up with links back to my main website, and I would assume I am spinning my wheels if I am not even registered? If you can let me know if this tactic (creating a review website of various other home business opportunities) will work, I would be most appreciative! I have had my site up since March and it just sits stagnant!

Do you think this will breath some immediate life into the site? (ie: traffic?) Thanks in advance, Dave. Love the book so far! Also, when you agree to add other links to your website, where do you put them? Should I create an entire page just for links? And where is the best place to get into reciprocol linking when your site is relatively new? Does reciprocol linking work as well as building a review site? (ie: one way linking?) and lastly, how do you suggest registering a new website in the future so that I don't have this problem again?


First off, let's start out with a definition. The sandbox is where Google puts new Web sites for anywhere from one month to three months or longer; their intent is to avoid having new sites pop up out of nowhere to be top o' the page results for a specific search. It's one way that Google maximizes the quality of its SERP (which you'll recall are search engine result pages).

For people building a new site, however, this is a real drag. Buy a domain name, build a nice site, get a bunch of inbound links from other sites, and you could still be "stuck in the sandbox" for months, waiting to show up in the search results.

One way that I've found for dealing with this is to...