2 year old site with PR n/a

[keyplyr]

I've been asked to improve ranking for a 2 year old site of 50 static pages with sufficient content. Besides minor coding errors (W3C validator failed on all pages) the page mark-ups are OK and better than many sites I've taken over. Server response headers are normal and rendering is standards compliant.

What jumped out at me immediately is that Google ranks this 2 year old site as PR n/a. Google has indexed all the pages (site:example.com) but shows no incoming links (link:example.com)

After 2 years, could the PR n/a be due solely from a lack of incoming links or is it likely that something on the site has triggered a filter and a penalty imposed?

[physics]

What does yahoo site explorer report for links...

[keyplyr]

Yahoo Sie Explorer reports a dozen incoming links, mostly in-site.

The owner and former webmaster did not create Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, or MSN LIve accounts and I have only just now started my assessment.

(no sitemap.xml nor robots.txt either)

[keyplyr]

Anyone else have a theory?

[hutcheson]

Does the site show up for "sufficiently specific" Google (phrase) searches?

[keyplyr]

In SERPS for the company name but no other search terms.

[Robert Charlton]

How about an exact quote from the home page?

Does the site have unique content? Unique titles?

Yahoo Site Explorer reports a dozen incoming links, mostly in-site

What do you see when you look at the "Except from this domain" inlinks? Site Explorer will occasionally include links from ads, eg, that contain referrer strings etc that make them essentially useless for ranking.

[keyplyr]

Thanks

How about an exact quote from the home page... Does the site have unique content? Unique titles?

Very little crawlable content, mostly large images. When I search Google/Yahoo for snippets of what little text content there is, both return results from this site but with PR n/a.

Site needs to have these images chopped up and the text on the images needs to be "real" text in the mark-up. Most of the title tags are promo hype that duplicates and there are no heading tags.

What do you see when you look at the "Except from this domain" inlinks?

Yahoo actually reports 21 incoming links, but only 2 are from other domains. Both are deep pages from these other domains and show a PR0, although the home pages of these sites show PR4 so they appear as "good neighborhoods."

So far, unless someone feels that there may be a penalty (at least from Google) I think the poor page rank may only be caused by 1.) lack of indexable content and 2.) lack of incoming links. More applicable title tags, optimized content and improvement of code/content ratio by moving JS and CSS files to off-page is also needed IMO.

Opinions are appreciated, thanks.