prairie - 2:47 pm on Aug 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

My experience has been that the "rules/filters" for new sites are lax when compared with old sites. Sites I've left online and forgotten about have ranked far better than those I've tried to get anywhere with in recent times.

If you want something to have a better chance of ranking "as is" without losing your hair, put it on the oldest domain you have so long as its related.

If you only have a new site to work with, you're probably going to have to interact with the web to prove yourself. PR doesn't equal good rankings anymore, so we should all relax about letting it flow more readily.

If Brett's suggestion is right, then linking out intelligently serves as an automatic quality control for Google that's customized to the community the set of SERPs are meant to serve.

In this situation, by linking out to pre-existing respected sites, you're probably also fixing the SERPs as they are in place, and you may not rise above those until they link back to you in turn, or you outperform the other sites in other respects.