links not appearing

where are they

[penfold25]

My site is on google and has been refreshed lots of times. My other sites are also listed and frequently refreshed. I have pointed my 2nd site to link with the first site and no matter how many times it has been refreshed does not show a backlink from my site 2nd site.

Could it be because of a penalty?
Does it disregard backlinks if they not of the same topic?
What else could it be?

I know google has been having some problems, but this is occuring throughout alot and so have no backlinks for site 1, i know for a fact there are 5 links pointing there, but for some reason are not showing up?

[lazerzubb]

If the inbound links has a PageRank of less than 4 it often don't show up, it might also be due to time, that Google haven't seen it yet.

Try doing a search at Alltheweb.com with the LINK: commando, it often shows you more inbound links than Google does.

[Herenvardo]

It may seem useless, but happens more frequently than you could imagine:
Sometimes google shows only the "important" results and lets you, in the last page, to re-do the search includeing all "non-important" results. Probably you have already checked this but, if not, check it. I'm assuming that you have already checked that the URL in the link is not miss-spelled. The best way to check it is trying to open the link.
Also ensure that it's a stnadard <a href="file.htm"> link. Javascript or form's action links are not detected by google and many other search engines (I'd say that none detects this, but there can be new engines taht i don't know and do it :))