Google backlink confusion.

Hi,

I have read that Yahoo is concidered a better SE to use for backlink tracking, but -

My site is now 2 months old. I have done a lot of article marketing and am now ranking google page 1 for my easy keywords and from page 2 to page 5 for the harder ones.

Today one of my easy keywords shot from page 1 3rd, to 94. (only in google, all other SE's are still page 1)

I know that there are many possible reasons for this, but decided to do an analysis of my backlinks (page rank, still alive, etc.) as an educational excercise.

The results have me completely stumped as to how this lot works.

1) I tried various tools and websites and they all show 0 backlinks in google..
2) typing link:mydomain in google gives no results.
3) typing my domain name in google shows thousands of sites linking to my URL.
4) Google webmaster tools says I have 11,900 odd incoming links.
5) webmaster tools lists 'the 32 best incoming links'
6) if i click download all incoming links in webmaster tools I get a csv file with 46 URLs.

Is this concidered normal?
Is trying to analyse incoming links based on google's data an impossible task?
Am i missing something big time?

Any light you can shed on this would be appreciated.

Thanks

Dave

Sounds like a sandbox. People would suggest to delete any backlinks of bad quality and continue with link building by submitting to high PR directories. Its going to require patience though, I wouldn't suggest panicking and start blasting thousands of backlinks

Before you do anything, I'd suggest you just wait a day or two to see what else changes.

Ok thanks, I give it the weekend and see how things look on monday.

Appreciate the advice.

Dave