pls advise - trying to target niche keywords

Small bookseller site. Cannot compete with the big dogs on keywords like "books", "music", "video" so my advise was to find niche products to push. Examples: quilting books, WWII books, martial arts books, etc. I'm about 6 weeks into this plan and the latest Google dance was a HUGE disappointment. I BRIEFLY saw some of the targeted pages on up to 3 datacenters.

Main URL: http://www.halfpricebooks.com (PR6)

Notice link at bottom: "interests" which links to http://www.halfpricebooks.com/interests.asp (PR4)

On interest.asp, 12 keywords are targeted and each of the 12 link to 12 pages where that keyword is (hopefully) optimized. All are NOT RANKED (grey bar)

Question for any who are generous enough to offer advice:

1. Apparently, Google pick up some of the targeted pages, and then dropped them. Why?

2. Do you approve of my approach?

3. If no to above, what would you do different?

I know that the Google software engineer stated that google did not like being issued session ID #s. If you attempt to do this google will not crawl your other pages.

targeting niche is a great idea

you should place a tag that identifies googlebot and does not offer it a session id.

offering google a session id would either cause your site to appear larger than it is, or for google to overwork and crash your server

either way is bad so they will not delve into it


Search Marketing Info

These pages briefly showed up in the May dance (the long one). Nowhere to be seen in the current (June) dance. A session gets tacked on the URL "on the way" to these pages but it gets dropped when at the page. Does everyone agree a session in the url may be hurting me?