I've been doing a lot of reading on this site and webmasterworld forums (and google in general) about the issue, but i've had a site up for about 30-40 days now, and after the latest pagerank update, my site is still showing up with no pagerank, and as 'information not available at this time' in google sitemaps. I've seemingly done all the right things to optimize, we do show up in some SERP's, and some PR predictors (like iwebtool's) show that we should be a 4 or 5 PR. I'm interested in other peoples' thoughts about this topic. Are we simply too young in google's eyes to receive a PR? Is there something big I'm missing? From the get-go we did pretty much everything right as far as my research tells me. We opted to use non-www, and have only ever used that (www does a 301 redirect to no-www), we've been building quality/unique content on a daily basis since we began, we've done minor SEO (but nothing questionably black hat), we published a sitemap as soon as we started, that is updated daily based on new content (we're using wordpress to drive the site), etc. It's a bit disheartening to see no pagerank for us, we've worked pretty hard, have about 2500 backlinks according to various tools (we've been hard at work submitting to directories, but no link exchanges, or any of that). Any advice is appreciated, thanks!
30 to 40 days is a very small amount of time in Google's eyes, and while some in this forum may disagree, it's been my experience that G is using some sort of filter for newer backlinks (ie, the links will ultimately benefit you, but perhaps not for quite a few months.) I believe they do this to try to discourage people from buying links (ie, who wants to purchase a link if they have to wait six months for it to have some effect?) Patience is the name of the game, and if you are at least getting some hits from Google right now then I wouldn't worry about it too much. Just keep building relevant backlinks, creating quality content, and staying away from sneaky SEO tactics... you'll do fine in the long run. it just takes time. Good luck!
The data in export in the PR update is at least 6 weeks old, and may be as much as 8 weeks out of date. If your site is less than 40 days old then it simply wasn't around when this data was collated.
Thanks for the advice so far, it is encouraging to have confirmation of this. I do realize 40 days is a short span of time, but we were really hoping to come out of the gates running, having learned a lot about SEO very quickly, and applying the knowledge to see mistakes i've made with other websites. Like I said, we've stayed far away from blackhat SEO techniques, we've only submitted links to directories that allowed free listings, we don't have any 'bad' outbound links, we ping to sources such as technorati, and we're generally just building genuine content, as I hear over and over there is no substitute for it (and I believe it). We are receiving actually about 80% of our traffic from search engines now, at around 200-400 uniques per day, we were really hoping we'd be 'mature' enough by this past update to increase that number substantially, but i suppose it does just take time.
Wait for at least 3 months. I had to wait for 2 months to receive my first PR. I have heard that Google PR is only updated every 3 months or so.
The PR export is a snapshot from around July 22, the latest backlinks are from early September. The two month delay is unusual, normal is about one month. Google had a small, frozen, quirky update of some sites on August 24th. The current PR being exported to d/c's is using the same data. Rest assured, you have PR, you simply did not make the cutoff for the visible export.