Puzzled: PR and search results

I am a bit confused about something.

A little over a month ago I launched a new web site SHARPS and FLATS. To the best of my knowledge I used sound SEO techniques that are described on this site. Such as:

- every page has a unique title tag

- every page has a unique meta description

- all pages link back to the home page

- the entire site is rich with text and it just so happens that the text is naturally keyword rich

- any time a keyword is mentioned in any of the text it is internally linked to a page about that

- all external links to 3rd party web sites are made through an out.php script

- all actual external links that appear anywhere on the new site are linked to other sites that I own and those sites link back to that one

- I have a blog and a twitter that have a couple of links to the new site

- I have a couple of other sites that link to the new site, without the new site linking to them


So, after over a month my PR is still a round zero. Also, Google backwards links search shows that there are no links to my site (which is absolutely not true).

What is confusing is that this new site showed up on the first page of Google, in just about all search results that I can think of as relevant to that site. Also, I have a script that follows incoming traffic and I see that people are finding me through Google through all the relevant search terms.

So, I am a bit puzzled that my PR is zero, that Google still doesn't show any incoming links, but the page is already on the first page of on all relevant Google searches.

Is Google just slow at updating the PR and incoming links? Or am I missing something completely?

Google is slow at updating the toolbar PR, but that does not mean that they are not updating the PR that they use to evaluate sites - they just dont tell the world what it is.

Google also dont show all the links they see. Yahoo is better at seeing your backlinks.

But hey, why worry if you on the first page. You know what you are doing is working.

Thanks for the reply...

What you say makes sense, in a way that it explains what I am seeing. It is, however, still a bit of a mystery why Google doesn't update the toolbar PR on time and why they don't show all the links. I'm trying to figure out what they may stand to gain from hiding this information.

Anyway, like you said, why worry if the searches are working just the way I was hoping?

Google used to update the toolbar PR all the time, but webmasters obsessed over it and people did a lot more reverse engineering and they stopped, on purpose.

Also, if you make an account in Google Webmaster Central you CAN see all your backlinks (the yahoo suggestion also works, but Yahoo of course won't report Google links).

One of the projects I worked on there was revamping the agency’s website, which was sorely out of date and failing to generate any inbound sales enquiries because it was not appearing in search engine results for any relevant terms.