I am doing a back link "analysis", of a competitor. I have done many, many such reviews where I am going to their back links to see if I can get a feeeewwwww of those links for my site. This particular site is shown on the yahoo site explorer as having a back link from a site yet when I go to the site to take a look around, that sites backlink is nowhere to be found. I can see now finding the backlink on a couple of them but so far I have not been able to find the back links on about 20plus. This particular site uses a LOT of footer text links - paid - but the back links are nowhere to be found? Yahoo site explorer captures those links regardless of the age of the link, right? So what am I missing. Can you "hide" those back links except for the google bots to see? If so, why would the site agreee to do that and what benefit would their be? Would that be black hat practice or am I just slow witted, Don't answer that!