How long does it usually take for the backlinks to start showing up in Google? Alternately, is there another way of checking backlinks?
Heres a link to check on page rank and back links http://webmasterseoblog.com/alexa-backlink-pagerank-checker/
It can take a while for backlinks to show up. Google will never show you all of the backlinks through the link:www.domain.com command. Yahoo is much better at showing more of your backlinks.
I find link diagnosis helpful. It uses Yahoo to identify backlinks and ranks them by PR, follow/nofollow, KW etc. The results can then be downloaded to Excel. You need to use Firefox with a plug-in however and it can be buggy at times. But, when it works, it provides solid results.
It seems to depend on where the links are coming from and the rank of the pages linking to you. Having a link on a high PR site that is crawled often will show up faster. My DP links seem to take a long time to show up but they tend to show up all at once. Yahoo also counts links but they crawl much slower then google.
it can take a maximum of the ranking period, if you google accept that link, it start showing it in link:
It takes a while for search engine spiders to find and credit you for links. Yahoo’s site explorer is a pretty cool tool, //siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
Yeah I recommend Yahoo Site Explorer, it seems to update the number of backlinks a lot more regularly than Google does.
Google won't show all of your back links so the competitors can't get a hold of them, you can see your backlinks using google webmaster tool or yahoo site explorer
You can check the backlinks for your site in Google webmaster tools, yahoo site explorer, and online tools. Google usually updates the backlinks within two weeks.