Okay i have read enough different opinions on this subject. But can someone give me a better time frame for a new site to obtain any page rank. I keep reading anywhere from 3-5 months? I have also heard the process has been slower now then in the past. If 3-5 months is the new site "prison sentence" is there any hope for "parole"? Anyway to speed up this process? aloha from hawaii.
you won't get a PR unless you have inbound links. period. it generally takes two updates (between a month and a half and two months) before you'll see the full effect of the added backlinks. just because you're not seeing the PR on the toolbar doesn't mean it isn't being taken into account for the SERPs though.
In reality your pages should pick up page rank on the first backlink/PR update after they have been found. So if they got picked up today indexed within a day or two, then if the PR upadate started the day after, you could have your PR within a week. Updates are running anywhere from 3 -6 weeks at the moment, so if your pages appear in the google index, then provided you have links to your site who have PR to transfer (all pages have PR, but I mean of any significance PR2 upwards) then you should have initial PR within a month.
in my experience it usually (but not always) takes two updates- after the first, it's cached, and will start showing a "PR0" (instead of a grey), but it won't be until after another update that it's given the "real" (non PR0) PR.
The other thing that starts happening that confuses the issue further, is that the Google toolbar will start to guess asign PR to pages you add to a site once it becomes well known to google. You often see posts on forums get assinged a pr2 or pr3 as soon as they are created (we get this on the highrankings forum) there is absolutely no way it can be real PR, it is just estimated based on the PR of the pages in the site structure.
As usual, OWG is exactly right. We have had quite a few sites get ranked and get assigned a PR2 or PR3 and then slip. After the drop, each has risen and stayed up. The estimates you have already been given in this forum match almost "to the letter" our results. Some things just take time...(and lots of work!).
So shoot for 2 months then assuming you catch 2 updates... Cool thanks for the help.... i will keep hunting for more inbounds!!