I did a google link check on my website - it shows about 138 links to my site, and almost all of them come from ActiveRain.

NONE, and I mean NONE, come from this site, where I've had my site linked in my signature for months and months....and as you can see by my post count, I have a lot of posts.

So why isn't this site showing up in my backward links?

Neither are any of my posts from another forum (not real estate).

Does google not count forums anymore?

using link: just shows a sampling of links to your site that Google chooses to show - not all of the ones Google is aware of. If you check your links in your Google Webmaster Tools account you will see all of your links - and you should see links from this site.

Thanks Doug...now I found it....over 2000 links. yikes!! That's a lot....and my PR is only 2.

I have to beef up my content more, I know. It's a very slim site right now.

Your PR problems may have more to do with the fact that you have duplicate title tags and meta tags on many of your pages - which then makes the pages duplicate content in Google's eyes. I would change that before worrying about adding more content. Content does not create higher PR but duplicate content can create lower PR

Thanks for that heads up - I had meant to go back and customize the header info for each page and I forgot - so now it's fixed.

wonder how long it will take to adjust if Google is going to grant me more PR? that would be nice...lol

Google will quickly show the changes in its cached copies of the pages and in the titles and snippets that it shows in the serps - but it seems to take many months before those changes are actually factored into the ranking.

This can be seen regularly when Realtors leave the business and their website changes to a parked page or a "no website found" page. It can often take many months before that changed site loses its former positions.

So, patience is required.

yeah, that's what I figured...it may take a year. LOL

Oh well, a PR of 2 for a not so perfect website that's less than a year old isn't half bad. when I get more content up I should do better with hit.s it's done reasonably well for me so far, gotten more than a few customers, between that and my blog.

Content can help you gain PR indirectly, though it can't be compared to the result of pure link building still it can help. If people see your site has a good content they may link back to you as the original source for such particular content.

I use http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ to check my backlinks and I've noticed something from the backlinks coming from agentsonline forum only the last keyword in my signature appeared, anyone know why?

I would rather have a small amount of quality backlinks than a thousand of less quality backlinks

The page rank that displays on the toolbar (also known as the foolbar) is only updated a few times a year, but the changes you do today will start affecting your position in the SERPs once your pages are indexed and cached with the change, the PR is there but it doesn't show on the foolbar.

Good point deepsea a lot of people don't realize that it is consistently being updated but everyone pays attention to the foolbar.

Which one does Google use in calculating link juice the one on the toolbar or the internal PR?

They use the internal PR. Ranking changes due to PR changes are noticed long before the Toolbar PR changes. When the PR changes on the Toolbar there is no immediate ranking change because that has already happened (sometimes a month or two before) when the internal PR changed.

I liked that "foolbar", you can copyright this term ;-)

In order to increase your toolbar PR you have get quality backlinks. Quality backlinks are from relevant websites and if possible an authority website.

article marketing will actually help establish both your site as an authority and give your site quality back links. just something to think about.

Most links listed by google are links associated with contents... though signatures may help but they are for real traffic and not for building PR... but still, signatures are one of the most powerful way of advertising..

admin, that makes alot of sense. i have a website in the box and i had to change a lot of the tags and webpage content. although i didn't have everything changed before the update in may so i will have to wait to see if everything i changed will matter. i also thought to have a better page rank, you have to add hundreds of pages. most sites i noticed that have page rank 4+ have plenty of pages.