I am astounded by the results I recieve from iwebtool's Link Popularity Checker. Apparently, Google does not index most of the pages on my site, even though I've submitted a complete sitemap. Unlike google though, yahoo! and MSN/Live have near or over a thousand links back to my site. It seems that googlebot is unable to index most of my site, even though I use pretty SE-friendly URLs. No, I have never done anything that would piss google off. I use adsense, so I'm actually a customer of sorts for them. So why the discrepancy between the most popular and established search engine and the other two? Does google's crawler just plain suck? Because I know, I recieve at least 8x the traffic from the googlebot than I do from any other, and even so near nothing gets cached.
I was reading this article by Aaron Wall and I think that it will be very helpful for you: http://www.seobook.com/relevancy/ I second infonote's statement here, then again we can see a lot of doorway pages in Google's SERPS.
Google only shows about 1% of my backlinks compared to the others (and most of those are relevant - as I didn't ask for most of them)...
I can say that even Google sends more traffic to my web sites I like Yahoo and MSN because they are more friendly in their index policy.
Google only show a bit ammount of the backlinks it has, for any site, in its database, its for all the sites, its here for a while now. if it shows 10 BLs, doesnt mean it has only 10 BLs for your site in its database... Googlebot is able to crawl all of your pages, and it does index them, just it takes a bit longer than yahoo/MSN. probably its because all the filters(??) they apply.
What is the Google Sandbox? I have been hearing about this from several people. I know it has something to do with new sites and spammers; the new sites, or links to new sites, are supposedly ignored for three months. Perhaps this explains why I rank so much better in Yahoo and AltaVista than Google?
The sandbox is designed to stop legitimate, hardworking whitehat webmasters from getting their pages indexed and in the SERPS too quickly. It works perfectly. On the other hand, if you'd like to get your pages indexed quickly, simply set up a few thousand subdomains, put in only one page per sub (index.html), stuff it with keywords, link all your pages together with long lists of links, and in 3 weeks you too can have billions of pages in google. Oh, and don't forget to put in your adsense!