RogueDirectory is talking bollocks. As Alan Murray pointed out, it is the sandbox and not 'Hollow PR' that effects newer sites. His friend did nothing wrong and shouldn't of been ranking for competative terms within 3 months, according to Google. As his friends links and site ages, he will begin to rank as he should. Pete
If you move to fast to soon you essentially become "flagged". This can result in penalization or banning (very rare). Though, I have never been in that position before I would hold off on aquiring any new links for a period of several months and work on building relevant, worth-while, content. Getting inbound links from trusted sites/directories may help though (dmoz, yahoo, microsofts directory). But once your flagged your in trouble - and as part of googles updates it checks your whois information so next time you pop up a site your being watched. When you first start a site - you must build slowly and steadily. Google understands seasonal spikes but be patient with your sites growth. hope this helps, RogueD
What about my site. we have been on the internet since 1999. is it possible that we could have been flagged for select keywords?
One reason would be credibility. I place my StatCounter unobtrusively at the bottom of the page. Anyone happening upon it will see that in its lifetime there have been 173,778 pageviews on the website. Hopefully that gives them a little confidence that this is a credible website and maybe worth looking at. (I realize that unscrupulous webmasters can lie by setting the page count higher than it really is. But I think that most people trust page count meters as honest numbers.)
Thanks Jim4767 I never thought to put my counter on the bottom of the page. I do have one on one of my sites. I just didnt know where I should put mine so I just stuck in between some items on my front page. But as far as PR. Many people want to bad mouth PR. Dont. It is a useful tool for traffic purposes and listings in MSN, Yahoo, Google etc. and what not. But do not weigh to heavily on it either. You still have to do promotions and advertising to get your site looked at even with high PR. I have a PR4 on one of my sites and the traffic is steady but not overwhelming. The site went from 0 to 4 in less than 6 weeks. I do know it had to do with backlinks, articles, how many users I had and the number posts and what not. But I am curious about another site I just recently built. I finished it after the last PR update. I do have links to sites with PR 2 or higher and a few with 0. I have about 20 users with over 100 posts. I am averaging about 50 uniques a day without any promotion other than in my sig. So I would be curious to see where it places in the next PR update.