The backlinks for my website http://www.exotic-nepal.com is shown as zero in google. I have been trying for a month, hoping that one day it would update its dataservers and show the backlinks but it never does.

Does google actually update its a website's backlinks once in a while or it s always in the precoess of doing so? I believe yahoo, msn update at once, when a backling is spotted. MSN shows quite a number of backlinks for the given website, yahoo shows what's real.

Also, I tried checking the backlinks of my competitor websites. Many of their backlinks count had been increased from links inside their own website linking to the home page. My website also has a shared left naviagation bar on every page but these are never counted as backlinks.

Could someone please enlighten me on this topic?

Backlink updates that are visible usually happen just before a PR update, which is usually every 4 months.

But google constantly monitor backlinks and alter pagerank, we only get t see it every few months though..

Like stOx said Google is constantly monitoring your backlinks. Google also is notorious for not showing all of yur backlinks. They only show a subset of your backlinks. If you've got them I'm sure Google knows about them or most of them. Don't worry too much about what they do or don't show.

Also, Google won't show ALL of them, only the one's that they feel are important, so don't be suprised if the number is considerably lower then other SE's.

Thanks guys. This really made me relieved.

What about those internal links pointing to the home page being treated as backlinks. I think my competitor sites, which are in static HTML, have benefitted by such easy generation of backlinks but mine , which uses PHP includes is not recognised as one.

Again it's probably just Google not showing your internal links yet much the same way their not showing all the inbound links. Google will see your php links fine. They may not list them all.

Once a site adds a link to your site, it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months before you'll see it showing up as a backlink in Google. If the link is on a page that has a PageRank which is less than 4, it may not show up at all. That doesn't mean that it's not counted towards your overall link popularity quotient, but you may not see it in the list of links to your site. Also Google is smart enough to ignore links created by automatic directory submission software or back links from link farms.

actually it makes little difference what PR the page is. Google just shows a random selection of links

Chirs is right agan. I had read something awhile back about Google not showing backlinks below PR4, but I know it shows backlinks for my site that are below PR4. Maybe that's the way they once did it, bit the backlinks now are just a random sampling.