backlinks not showing up, but rank is moving

I have a site in a small niche - for the longest time, it was ranked 314 in the broad results for G. Market Samurai showed 4 backlinks to it, articles I had written thru ezines.

Anyway, I've done whois sites, some generic directory submissions and bookmarking and RSS pings. Nothing has shown up in MS as new backlinks, but suddenly my rank in shooting up. I'm now 45 in the broad results.

I know G never shows every thing (right now, it's showing nothing, the only backlinks I see are through Yahoo Site Explorer), but how can I find out what's helping my rank? If it's just those articles or if the other stuff is working, but not showing up...

They will appear it just takes time.

Every backlink that you created for your site should have some values (more or less depending on how relevant and trust worthy the site that your are linking from). As it may take some time for the spiders to find and index all your backlinks, you may not get immediate results.