New site failing to rank - could this be why?

[zakkyg]

I have a new client site that is not appearing anywhere in the top 100 for its main keywords. ASSUMING that this is not an issue with optimization or link quality, I am wondering whether it might be the following...

The client's company has a parent company whose website has decent authority. This website links to the new (client) website. In addition, the 2 press releases we have done include links to both companies, since one was an outgrowth of the other.

This is all 100% natural, so my inclination is that this is not causing the issue. But does anyone have any experience to suggest otherwise? That having website A linking to website B, and 50+ press release websites linking to both, could be causing the algorithm to throttle website Bs ability to rank?

Thanks in advance!

[O2C]

I can't see that being an issue, not one that would affect it that badly any way.

Have you checked that Google is crawling the site correctly? Site set up in Google Webmaster Tools with no error messages?

Double checking that all pages can be indexed and aren't being blocked in the robots.txt file is the best place to start.

How new is the site?