New Site PR5 but listed on page 19 and dropping!

[mexvideo]

Hello All,
I launched our new website about a month and a half ago and although we have a PR5 we are way down on page 19 (started on 16). ( www.oaxacafinecarvings.com our most important search string : oaxacan wood carvings ) Googlebot visits the site nearly every day and most of the pages have been indexed. The site is #7 on Yahoo and #3 on MSN. What's going on with Google?

I don't understand what I am doing wrong. Have another website: www.mataortiz.com that is 1 or 2 in Google and I don't see the difference with this new site)

Can somebody take a look and advise.
Thanks so much!
May

[glengara]

Well according to G, the only links it's recognising are from your own network, which could explain its lack of interest in the site.

[Jeff Martin]

Two things I see here:

Well according to G, the only links it's recognising are from your own network, which could explain its lack of interest in the site.
The 'link:' search for G has never worked correctly (by design?)

we have a PR5
A more important question may be what did those sites ranking higher than you do? Maybe their growth from an alogo point of view has been at a greater level.

You said you launched this site a month and a half ago, have you been aggresively link bulding say more than 2-3 a week? It could be that the slower/steady growing competing sites are getting more value out of their existing links and are adding newer ones as well. If you apply to the devalue of links for new sites theory than this would play right into that in terms of the newness of the links and your site.

[glengara]

Like in this instance, I've found that while the G link search results are pretty useless from a numbers or high PR links POV, they can often still be quite informative.

IIRC, Y! was showing about 20 links, so the link gathering has probably not been too aggressive...

[mexvideo]

Thanks for your response. So as adviced I will try to request more links to my site. I don't know why some of them don't appear yet. For example a DMOZ listing.
Thanks so much for your help.
May

[Jeff Martin]

Just make sure you dont get too many inbound links too fast, especially from low value sites and directories. Also make sure to use different variations of your link text.

G wants to see a nice steady growth for a new site not 200 links in one months time with the same link text.

[mexvideo]

Thanks Jeff! I will take your advice. I hate just linking for the sake of ranking, so I really need to find good links related to my site. (It is ridiculous to have hundres of cialis and viagra links :)
Thanks again to you both!
May