I know this question may have been asked many times before so excuse me for asking again. About how long does it take for your backlinks to show up in google?
Usually backlinks happen a bit more frequently than PR updates, but I don't know the exact intervals.
Definitely use webmaster tools for this. Yahoo does a much better job at showing backlinks faster. For example, my blog, which has been up for a little over a month has 0 backlinks in Google, but has over 100 in Yahoo and it increases daily (thanks to DP forums).
Yea, they usually do happen more frequently than PR updates, but probably around 4 months. But you should still check periodically.
different websites get different crawl rates.. which in turn determin the length of time to show a backlink
I have had backlinks show up in one day before. But the majority of times it takes about a month or even two. It does depend on when the site with the link gets crawled.