How long for Link Popularity/Page Ranking Updates?

[MidwestMerchant]

Hey everyone..First off i'd like to admit I am a total newbie in the seo market. Although I've done alot of reading and this forum alone has helped me out a great deal. I just got my website up and running less than a month ago. I've added my site to numbers of directories and other websites as well as done some link exchanges with good websites in my niche. So far in the past week I went from about 4,000,000 down to about 1,200,000 on Alexa (let me remind you my site has only been up for a few weeks)..I recently did a complete re-design of my website to make it more seo friendly, before the site was done completely in Flash, now Im using H tags and link titles..etc..Ok, so enough of my rambling let me get to the question. What is the expected wait time for my link popularity and page ranking to increase? Ive done some link popularity checks and have very little links so far even though Ive been using PPC's and link submitting/exchanging, I even bought some targeted hits from ones of those "10k hits for $25" ordeals, just to try and bring my popularity up. My page ranking is still 0/10 and im curious as to why..Does it take a month or so to generate? was it because my site was done in flash?..Any input is greatly appriciated I really need to get my page rank and link popularity up

[prairie]

The toolbar no longer updates on a roughly monthly basis (I hadn't actually been paying attention myself in the past, but I gather it was roughly one month between updates).

The effect on inbound links can *seem* to take anywhere from a few days to several weeks to take effect.

As a rule of thumb, I no longer bother with new links unless they contribute to the user's experience.

If your site is done wholly in Flash, that really needs to change if you want to get some sort of search engine visibility going. You'd need to amass quite a lot of links to make up for not having text on your page/throughout your site.

Lastly new sites have can terrible problems ranking and gaining momentum courtesy of the Sandbox/Sand Lag/March Filter ... it has so many names now, all of which can be researched here.

[MidwestMerchant]

thanks for the reply! ill search the site a little more for the sandbox you were talking about