Hi, I've been working on building backlinks for my site for nearly 2 years now and although I have over 2000 one way links to my site only 5 of them have been picked up by Google. I'm trying to optimise primarily for the key phrase "mens clothing" and having looked at the links of my page 1 competitors, they all have, without exception, 3 plus pages of Google links. Why is it that Yahoo, MSN ect pick them up but Google doesn't, and is it a good idea to use those competitors links as a basis of building links back to my site, the theory being, that if it worked for them it'll work for me. Steve
Google's link operator doesn't show all the back links it knows about in an attempt to obfuscate why a site ranks. You can set up a google webmaster tools account to get a better idea of what google is counting as a back link.
I have google webmaster tools that's where I'm getting my info from, 5 google backlinks after 2 years. Steve