Google bot hates me

Take two steps back and breath.

Google is unpredictable at best of times but can't always blame them, can you give us your URL and what/how your searching for your site.

Google has a few servers and they do the rounds all the time, could be picked up today, tomorrow, next week, could already be picked up but in the sandbox.
How many (meta) keywords? about 20 good descriptive related keywords which are mentioned in your site at least 3 times. the keywords in your content, what you think is a keyword isn't necessarly what google with think are keywords. (I got a model site and put "no diecast here" on it once and stupid google listed diecast as keyword)
How many links are to many? when it effects the content, when it effects the users browsing of your site
How many are to few? there is never to few.

Take another step back and think content, rich content that will enhance the browsers experience. If you have the content the rest will follow.

I appreciate the advice. I have been told Google's bot is highly unpredictable at most. Seems like I'll be sitting on my hands for a while. lol

The best and quickest way to get indexed is by having someone place a link on their site (the site must be older and indexed by Google) linking to yours. Google will spider that page your link is on and pick up your url.

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep pluggin away.

I have done a link popularity check and I have over 100 links tied to my website in each MSN, Yahoo and AltaVista. Yet Google and HotBot/Inktomi still show 0. I use submitexpresses to check link popularity.

The link:domain.com facility in Google was disabled almost 2 years ago it can not be relied upon. If you want to know if a link is being counted by Google, the only way to know for sure is to visit the anchor page (where the link lives) and view the cache: of it in Google. If the page is cached then you are getting link benefit for it. If not, then you're not.

try using google's sitemaps function and get more links to your site out there!

Google is all over the shop right now (again!) with the cache & PR facility being totally unreliable! Just keep getting links to your site and as locatepeople says maybe try the google sitemap route.

We're getting hammered by google daily and now top 1000 uniques a day. Make sure your pages are SEO, and getting links is a great way to get google bots from one site to another. What you want is cheap links on sites with existing pr from google. This will introduce googlebots to your site AND start to give it some web 'relevence'.

-Mike

You are probably listed, you just havent looked far enough. The Google head usually sticks you on page 20 or so. It's all based on your link popularity, so you could stay on page 20 forever, that is unless they put you on 50.

Well, good news, after almost 50 days it looks like Google's bot has finallyl started crawling around my website. Very, very slow going but at least it found me there. Now it's back to keyword relevancy and density and popularity research...neverending chore! Thank you guys and gals for all your help and advice. Guess I just needed to be a bit patient, that's all. (not good at that but I'm learning)

rumour has it that google's "sandbox" isn't intentional although they say it is. SEO people have speculated it is a side effect of their servers getting way way too many requests and having a poor management system.

Then again, with the secrecy surrounding google's algo updates no one really knows what's going on apart from the google tech guys.

Okay, seems the sitemap may have kind of worked. I think I said earlier that I did a link check via SubmitExpress and had over 100 links listed on every site except Google and HotBot's. The site map may have initially gotten Google to notice and creep through it very briefly but there has been no such visits by the bot since then. Could something have "turned off" the bot so it wouldn't go any further or connect any links with my site or something I'm not aware of?

Google is completely up the shoot at the moment it would seem as existing sites that previously were constantly crawled are now showing as not cached at all and the BigDaddy update is still ongoing and making things worse IMO - so it is just a case of sit tight, keep adding content, get external links to your site and pray G sort their new spider/bot out soon!