Site Spidered but not picking up keywords

Getting regularly spidered, have PR4 but nowhere at all on search

[hughie]

I have set a site up with all the regular tips n tricks, <h1's <h2's> <h3> good html-text ratio etc.

I have a PR of 4 on the home page (it's yet to spread around the site), quite a few inbound links and it is getting spidered by google, MSN, inktomi most days.

Yet for the keyword combination i'm after which isn't overly competitive, i'm not in the first 20 pages on any of the engines.

If i type in the name of my site i am found straight away which leads me to believe i'm not blacklisted or anything.

any ideas?

[Dubhglais]

I was just asked to review someone’s site and had a similar result.
They don't seem to be doing anything-wrong 114 inbound links, PR5. For some unique text on their home page they rank 598, however they are number 1 if I query with allintext: unique text. Have you tried this?

The only things I found that caused me concern were the following: about 100 lines of JavaScript in the head and 122 keywords in the meta tags.
The JavaScript is easily remedied with an external file if that is a problem.
Although its common knowledge that Google ignores keyword meta tags for ranking, do they use them to penalise if misused? I don't know, anyone got an answer to this?

[hughie]

Interesting, i'm on page 2 for the allintext query on google! Whats going on there then?

also..
No javascript going on in there either, I have just trimmed out a few of my keywords from places like the title tags in my links as i thought i might have overdone it.

Will have to wait for the results of that one. It's been 3 weeks since i SEO'd the site, could it be that the search engines take a while to take into account all the latest wordings?

[Dubhglais]

the results from the allintext query may indicate a keyword penalty. Some higher authotity in forums may want to confirm this for me.

[sem4u]

You site could be in the Google 'Sandbox'.

[google.co.uk...]

[Dubhglais]

I don't know about hughie, but the site I was reviewing has been established for a number of years.

[hughie]

Just an update.

after my more specific targeting towards my keyword phrase
:allintext widgets town name

query result from google resulted in a move from position 13 to positions 5&6.

Pleasing on that point, but still not in the top 200 positions for that keyphrase in a normal search.

Will i eventually trickle through the "sandbox" or is it a bit of a lottery in there?

ta,
Hughie

[michaeljl]

Where do you rank in the "allinanchor:" command for your keyword?

[hughie]

The rankings for those are..

allintext:5&6
allintitle:4&5
allinanchor:5

makes me want to throw my toys out of the pram ;-)

ta,
Hughie