The PageRank zero problem!!!

[Badrinath]

Offlate I am noticing that many newly launched sites have a pagerank of zero in spite of not being in the 'sandbox', Has anybody else noticed the same? Is there someway the pagerank of these sites can be increased?

Thanks,
Badrinath.V.S

[cbp]

PR and the sandbox have nothing to do with each other.

All new site have a PR0 on the toolbar as Google only exports a representation of the PR they use internally every 3 or so months...

[Badrinath]

cbp,

I dont use the toolba to find the pagerank, I use tools on the web. I have tried 3-4 tools and all agree that the pagerank for the sites I am talking about is zero. Also its been 2 months since the creation of the sites and they have numerous IBLs so its surprsing they have a pagerank zero.

[AussieWebmaster]

I don't think the update of PR is limited to the toolbar.... while keyword weights, etc and IBLs are counted - I really don't think the PR is updated as often as we believe.

[PhilC]

It's only the Toolbar PR that those sites can find. According to Google, PageRank is updated internally all the time, so pages can have PageRank that is working for them way before it is ever shown in the Toolbar.

[AussieWebmaster]

Then the PR0 page exists because it has yet to meet the first requirement - time or some such element?????

[PhilC]

Something along those lines. Apart from PR0 being indicitive of an actual, normal, PageRank value, and of a penalty, it also indicates that Google knows about the site (not necessarily a page), but hasn't done anything with it yet.

For instance, I have a new site, and I submitted a Sitemap containing all of the site's URLs. Google has got the Sitemap many times so far, along with the robotos.txt file. On several occassions it got the site's homepage, but nothing is showing in the index. The index doesn't yet know that the site exists, but the system does, and all the site's pages show PR0.

[Badrinath]

Philc,

let me rephrase "is there anything I can do about this, has my sight been penalized...., is there a way to find the correct pagerank"

[PhilC]

There is now way to find the actual PageRank. If the site is new, then it's highly unlikely to have been penalised, and it's just a case of waiting.

[Badrinath]

Thanks Philc Thankyou very much :-)

[marika]

I'm worried that my site is in the sandbox, we're suddenly showing a PR 0 for many pages on our site including the home page. How can I tell if I'm in the sandbox?

[mcanerin]

If you are "suddenly" showing as a PR0, implying that you used to have a different PR, then thats a problem, but it's NOT a sandbox issue.

The most common reasons are (in order decending order of likelyhood)

1) a technical issue, such as robots.txt, redirects, etc
2) A duplication issue
3) a linking issue
4) a penalty

I would look at the first three before assuming the last one. Sometimes technical, duplication or linking issues can result in a penalty, but more often they just result in a search engine getting confused and not ranking you properly, which is bad, but not necessarily a penalty.

Ian

[Badrinath]

marika,

like mcanerin pointed out you cannot be in the sandbox. But if you want to be completely sure about that just do a site:<yoursitename> search on Google. If that yields results other than the site's homepage, You are not in the SandBox.