page rank still 0?

Hello everyone just wanted to find out of I had done something wrong or if it was just my own impatience, but I installed vbseo a bit over a month ago maybe two months even, (not sure how to pinpoint a specific date). My content is highly targeted and I get decent traffic on a new forum (just over 6 months), however I still have a page rank of 0.

Can anyone give some insight as to what factors may be lacking on my end? Although my backlinking has been minimal (probably 4 or 5 reputable sites shoot people my way), would there be any other factors keeping me stuck at PR0?

Thanks all.

Justin Brand
Rule One Investment Community

What is the best way to go about doing this? Does acquiring back links entail nothing more than convincing other webmasters to link to your site by purpose of content/link exchange only? Are there any other faster/more effective methods of doing this?

don't convince them.

simply make the content that people WANT to link to on their own.

if a person had the funds, would submitting to any paid directory sites with a high page rank be of any benefit?

I recommend that if you are able to substantiate the expenditure, that you list yourself in yahoo's directory. I see enough traffic over the course of a year that I feel like I get my money's worth. At a minimum, the boost from their PR is helpful.

You'll also want to submit yourself to dmoz.org. If you wander the web in the right places, you'll find enough free directories to which you can submit your site that I don't think it imperative for you to do any other paid listings.

Remember that PR is calculated by Google every 5-6 months. Some newer pages do get a PR of 1, but I don't think this is the same as their global update. Every 5-6 months all at once, the PR of all my 15 sites will change. If you want to try to anticipate the update, you can use the Future Pagerank Tool.

Just getting 2-3 site with PR 3+ linking to you should be enough to get you going with a pagerank above zero. Remember, you want incoming links that are related in content to what your site is about. Also remember that Google "doesn't like paid links," which probably implies that any sites linking to you for less than 90 days don't count towards your PR.

The age of your domain name is also said to have an affect on PR. This is done by Google so that when a domain is expired and then re-registered by a new entity, the PR is cleared. From personal experience, I believe they look at the domain's creation date. If it's not very old, you won't have a high PR. All the high, high PR sites typically have one thing in common... age.

Traffic is also a factor. It'd be silly to think google doesn't review the surf logs of their toolbar users. If you haven't done it already, I recommend you install the Google toolbar. At a minimum, the pages you visit will be more likely to be indexed. I have personally tested this by publishing a page with no incoming links, then loading that in my browser once. Four days later the page was in Google.

If for some reason you feel that you are blacklisted (no urls in google at all, or lots of URLS and a pagerank of zero for months and months), you'll want to go over your site with a fine tooth comb insuring you don't have any cloaking, hidden links, or anything considered spam. Then you need to submit a "request for reinclusion" to google. I don't recommend completing this form unless you're absolutely sure you did something to blacklist your domain. Here's the instructions for that process:

Now where should you send a reinclusion request? This has changed in the last few months from an email address to a web form. The best location to go is http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py . You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and then select “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking.” Click Continue, and on the page that shows up, make sure to type “Reinclusion Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form. Upper- or lower-case doesn’t matter, but make sure you use the words “reinclusion request” in the subject line so it gets routed to the right place.

Now we come to the heart of things: what goes into a reinclusion request. Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that it’s not going to happen again. I’d recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that you’ve taken to prevent any spam in the future. If you employed an SEO company, it indicates good faith if you tell us specifics about the SEO firm and what they did–it assists us in evaluating reinclusion requests. Note that SEO and mostly-affiliate sites may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reincluded; such sites should be quite familiar with Google’s quality guidelines.