hi guys How can i check to see if google has found a backlink to my site from another site. Google in webmaster tools only show first 187 - i have 2000 backlinks. I need to verify if Google has recognized this link placement from a PR4 page.
You can using Google webmaster tool to check or type link:www.domain.com in Google.com. It will return the result to you.
No, don't do that. Google recognizes many links that it does't display in webmaster tools or a search with "link:" syntax. Simply enter the exact url of the page containing your backlink in quotation marks (eg. "http://backlinkurl.com") and see if that page comes up as a result. If it does, it has been indexed by Google and will count toward your rank, if it doesn't it hasn't been indexed, and won't have been counted yet. In your specific case, click the "cache" link next to the result to see if that PR4 page it has been re-indexed (crawled) by google since your link was added.
Sorry to be pedantic, but this is not exactly accurate: the page may have been indexed by Google before the link was added. To find if a backlink counts for your site, check the current cache of the linking page. This can be done via the Google toolbar or with the cache:URL operator. Check (1) whether your link is in the cached version of the page and (2) whether the link is not "nofollow." If (1) and (2) are both satisfied, you are fine.