I was checking one of my competitiors backlinks in google through links: http://www.xyz.com He has lots of links,about 2000. One of them was from a PR6 site's homepage. But when i visit that site's home page, i dont see any link to his website. I even tried locating it in Page source,but the link wasnt there. Why is it still showing in links: query result ??
I've noticed that sometimes Google will catch and index links on a page because of the link being in a Google Adsense ad, just depends when Google takes a snapshot of the page. If the page had Google ads on it (or any rotating text ad system) that might be where your competitors link was located.
Yah, it can take Google a lot of time to recache a page.... they may have been buying a pr6 link for a certain period of time, and between when google counted it as a link and when u got to the site, the ad period probably ended. There's a lot better ways to check your backlinks than Google's link: method.