Dave, I'm new to the web, paid a company back in March to register my new website with all the search engines. As I am now reading your book (Growing your Biz with Google) in August, I see that my website has a 0 page rank! does this mean that I am not even registered with "Google"? Did I get ripped off?

Do you think this will breath some immediate life into the site? (ie: traffic?) Thanks in advance, Dave. Love the book so far! Also, when you agree to add other links to your website, where do you put them? Should I create an entire page just for links? And where is the best place to get into reciprocol linking when your site is relatively new? Does reciprocol linking work as well as building a review site? (ie: one way linking?) and lastly, how do you suggest registering a new website in the future so that I don't have this problem again?

First off, let's start out with a definition. The sandbox is where Google puts new Web sites for anywhere from one month to three months or longer; their intent is to avoid having new sites pop up out of nowhere to be top o' the page results for a specific search. It's one way that Google maximizes the quality of its SERP (which you'll recall are search engine result pages).

For people building a new site, however, this is a real drag. Buy a domain name, build a nice site, get a bunch of inbound links from other sites, and you could still be "stuck in the sandbox" for months, waiting to show up in the search results.

One way that I've found for dealing with this is to put up something, anything, related to your new domain name as soon as possible, even if it will be completely replaced by your real site once it's built. It leads to some interesting PageRank situations, of course, where your home page is ranked (for previous content, but that's okay) while secondary pages aren't ranked at all, even though they're just one click away. If you have the Google toolbar installed, check out the weird way that PageRank works at my findability.info site currently: it's exactly that situation as I write this.

But don't panic! Not having PageRank doesn't mean that you don't show up in search engine results! In fact, they're pretty much independent of each other and pages with zero PageRank frequently show up in searches, while pages with high PageRank are sometimes impossible to find in a search engine.

To see if Google knows about your site at all, you need to use the special search pattern...