i started out with a couple websites a couple months ago. one i've worked on, submitted to many search engines and directories, have several pages of info and added a forum to it, and have many backlinks. another, started a couple weeks later, is like the stepchild, with only one page of articles and a seo toolkit, and no submissions anywhere. today, when i checked for their predicted pagerank, the first one is only a 3 and the stepchild has one of 5! not only that, 1st one receive virtually no google search referrals, whilst the latter only get google search referrals. the only difference i can see is that the first one has backlinks from others with page ranks between 1 and 5, whilst the stepchild has exactly 2 backlinks with page ranks of 5, one from its own internal page. also, the first website's entry page is .php whilst the latter is all .html. not only this, the stepchild is set up to link to the first website whilst the first website makes no links to the stepchild. the purpose of the stepchild is to serve the real child... i feel like a bad stepmother...
Here is a possible comparison of your websites: 1st Site: Links from PR1-PR5 OK Content Thus, it gets PR3 2nd Site: 2 Links from PR5 Better content It gets PR5 Although it seems wrong, why don't you wait a while til Google indexes your website (check their caches to figure out when they indexed your sites last) and link to the main site from your sister site. That's all I can think of.
how does a googlebot or search engine determine 'good content' other than how many backlinks there are? otherwise, it's like passing a literary judgement. in this case, the stepchild site has just one backlink. anyways, it's my stepchild no more...it's now cinderella.
Is that just your guess or are you going by a PR prediction tool? I wouldn't rely on those tools tooo much.