I have had some links to my site from some articles I written, but when I search through yahoo site explorer. Anyone know why?
they might have just vanished if they were from low quality article directories. a backlink to your site may not last forever. if SEs cannot find your link on the page where it was before or cant find the page anymore where your link was, your link will not show anymore. that is why it is important to keep building backlink as over time, some of the older links may fall off
It is a pretty common for link update delay in Google, especially when you see the links with link: search operator. If you do really wanted to see the fast link update, get your website being verified with Google Webmaster Tools and see the progress inside them instead of type manually in Google search box.
keep some patience, it will take some time to get indexed by search engines. once they indexed your article then search engines will display your backlinks