How does Google count incoming links?

Hi,

I have been building my blog for about two months now, and also actively building link exchanges and commenting on other posts and blogs. I tend to track the incoming links via the "link:URI" option in Google. But in despite of at least 3 links exchanges and numerous comments on other posts, the result in Google is zero.

How does Google count incoming links? Is it a matter of time, or what am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

It generally takes a while for Google to identify links to your site. Even then, not all links show up in "link:..." queries. A better way is to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools; that will let you see almost everything about your site that Google's crawler itself can see.