I'm missing something about backlinking, please help.

I've built plenty of backlinks to my sites but all of them by hand. Some are from high pr profile sites, some are from forums, some are from blog comments and so on...however, it seems that only a small portion of my sites got a ranking boost, most of them aren't even indexed, and it's been 2 weeks.

I find it really strange. I mean - if I would be spamming I could understand, but now I just don't get it. Why 2 of my sites are ranking for the keyword (1st and 2nd google pages), then maybe 1 site is indexed but can't be seen in the first 20 pages of Google.

I built the backlinks to the following:
- goarticles
- inner pages of my big sites (that aren't really visited much)
- other web2.0 properties.

Now, 2 of the 3 goarticles are ranking, the other 3 are not to be seen at all (not indexed).

While the big sites themselves are indexed and have some decent amount of pages indexed, the specific inner pages I built backlinks for AREN'T indexed.

These domains are actually at least 4 months old!

I did everything by the book this time. I just don't get it. Maybe somebody can help.

PS:
Before you ask - yes I did keyword research and everything. I am trying to rank for low competing longtails.

As for article marketing to make sure your article get indexed bookmark them, make some feeds from it with feedity or feedburner submit to rss directories and ping everything

Yeah I pinged everything with BMD and submitted rss feeds and stuff. That didn't help.

It's gettting harder and harder to compete with the new and better tools. Having a ton invested in white hat sites, it's frustrating - but you have to play the game.