Hi everyone, First of all, I am on this site nearly every day. I hardly ever post. But I have a question and I appreciate any and all help. My website has been online for 3 years. When I first started out, I did quite a bit of backlinking. I also own other websites that I link to this main one. The last month or so, I have been doing a lot of back-linking. I have been writing on nofollow and dofollow blogs, writing articles, etc. It still shows only 3 backlinks. How long does google take to show backlinks? Also, why would my other owned by me websites not show up as having backlinks? Also, when I run my web stats, I see where people are finding me from and there are other links that Google webmaster tools aren't showing. I am really stumped. Any thoughts? TIA!
Google Webmaster tools aren't exactly up to date and will never show all of your backlinks. If you put them there and they were left intact he'll find them eventually, but won't always tell you he found them.
Google will only show your strongest backlinks, search using 'link:' + site url or check under 'Google WebMasters'. All 'nofollow' links will be ignore, you will only get traffic, google won't care at all about them. Dynamic links like 'out.php=sitename' and moving links will probably get ignore too, try get hardcoded backlinks. If the link isn't used much or at all or it's listed with 1000s of others, google will probably ignore that too as spam or link farming. It's hard to get quality backlinks, check other sites pageranks (a pagerank of 2 with a few links is better than a pagerank of 7 with thousands) and most importantly that they are hardcoded follow links. Text around the link like a description is also google happy and that the site is related. Next is people need to use the link, if it's never used it is as good as dead. So it's best to work on getting quality content people would love to link to and visit.
Even the yahoo sitemaps is not a great tool and can show different links from day to day. Google state that they won't show all of your links, however they do count them and all links whether follow no follow have some sort of value.
Well it depends how often google crawls the site where your backlinks is located. For example if you recieve a link from digg, google will find it in seconds, though it may not display it.