Still Riding the Google Merrygoround

An update to my various previous posts on this issue. After taking a bit of a well-earned rest around my birthday I came back to see that Google was claiming 5000 pages in my site indexed (after a bit of digging it turned out to be more like 1300 pages but that was still wonderful!). OK, so a lot of pages were pretty rubbish and not very useful, still there were lots of 'good' pages in that list and I was really excited.

By Saturday the total was down to 181 and by today it was 148 pages indexed. So, what the hell happened to increase my number of indexed pages ten-fold and then to decrease again to just about what it's always been. I know that I've put a fair amount of effort into getting in-bound links (but Google isn't showing any of these). I can find them via MSN and Yahoo! searches.

So, what the hell is going on? Is Google broken beyond the hope of recovery (as seems likely for all fairly new websites). And will deep pages full of content such as my guide to edible wild foods which is three levels down within the site ever be indexed?

I'm at the point of complete and utter frustration with the whole web indexing system, especially as I add new good content that's being totally ignored by the indexing engines. What is the point?