We have a site www.casanuestra.com. When you enter www.casanuestra.com
into the search you get "Your search - www.casanuestra.com - did not
match any documents." However, if you enter link:www.casanuestra.com
you get about 100 sites linking to this site. Why doesn't Google seem
not to recognize the site? If so many sites are linking to it why
hasn't it been crawled and indexed by google? Or has it? Or how do you
know when a site has beed crawled and indexed by Google?

Hi, 

When looking for you site on google, its better to search for
casanuestra.com instead of www.casanuestra.com. It has something to do
with the way they index things. Searching for casanuestra.com brought
up one entry and it was your website. That's good news. Going to you
website I found that not only have you been indexed, but you have a
page ranking of 5, which is really good. In fact its better than most.
So, now that you have had the good news, lets answer your question on
"how to know when google has indexed your site."

The first thing you want to do, is get the Google bar. There are other
ways of finding out, such as the logs that dunos-ga pointed out, and
I'll get to those in a bit. The Google bar however will give you a
page rank status every time you check your page, and for all the other
pages you surf during the day.

Page rank is Google's system of deciding how relevant a page is, and
how often it will be indexed. Your page rank is affected by several
thing, one of them being how many external links you have to your
site, which is probably why you have such a high one.

You can get the Google bar at :
http://toolbar.google.com/

The installation is really easy, and its a nice tool to have if you
use Google as your main search engine.

Other ways to tell whether Google or any other bot has been to your
site is your site logs. These are normally available to you through
your ISP. The fastest way to search through logs to find bots is to
look for lines that have "robots.txt" in them. All search engine bots
ask sites for this file first, which is why its a good idea to have
one. The reports themselves will look a little daunting at first, but
don't let them throw you. Just open them in a tool like notepad and
use the Find option to search for robots.txt. In most log outputs the
"asker" for the file is located at the beginning of the line.

A list of web bots and some more information on this is at :
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Learning about how Google searches your site is a good idea as well.
You can find a huge FAQ on this subject at :
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm

Thanks, 

webadept-ga

There are many reasons why a site might not be in the google database.
Most of them are listed here:

://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/1.html#why

Google does recognise your site. I just performed a google search and
it came up fine when using the keyword "Casa Nuestra" and when putting
in your url "www.casanuestra.com". For example:

://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=www.casanuestra.com&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

You can tell that your site has been crawled by google because:

a) your site will appear in the google index, after a number of weeks

b) your site's access logs will have a line in them with the useragent
field set to something like:

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)


Hope this helps

Dunos, why don't you expand on this and post an answer rather than a
comment? I have nothing to add to this information and you should be
paid for this if you are a researcher.