newbie needs help

[yeto]

I have had my website up for three months now but only within the last two weeks have I been able to get a few other related websites to link to me. I still have a Google page rank of 0. How long does it usually take for page rank to go up?

I also read at WebMasterWorld that page rank no longer matters. Is this true?

If I type www.mywebsite.com, mywebsite.com or www.mywebsite.com/ my website will display. Is it true that Google will penalize you for having duplicate websites and that I need to have my webhost do some kind of 301 redirect (whatever that is)?

Thanks,
Yeto

[ryanbutler]

I'm not entirely sure how page rank works with any search engine, but I'd be more concerned with how often and how close to the top of the page you are listed, which is considered in terms of page rank. Most web hosts allow a website to be displayed using a variety of addresses, most of which you mentioned, so that's not a problem.

The larger problem is do you have meta tags for keywords and search terms on each of your web pages? Have you submitted your websites to Google, Yahoo, etc? Do you use Google webmaster tools to identify problems Google is having with your pages? One cool tool I purchased for my employer a few weeks back is XML sitemaps. It runs through a cron job on our server and scans our website for updated, added or removed pages and sends a notification to all major search engines nightly.

Websites can take a variety of time to show up but generally, it takes a few weeks. The more text you have on your website for spiders or bots to scan the better you are. Some thoughts to consider.

[ray326]

Those aren't considered "different" so that doesn't even come into play from a ranking standpoint. Obviously, page rank is important in some search results but it depends on the purpose of the page in the first place. Algorithmic ranking is becoming less important for commercial sites because they now buy their result position from the search provider.