Does his spam work for him?

Does anyone know the answer to this? I saw some spam on a blog a while back, and it caught my eye because the keyword tag on the spam URL mentioned my town. I couldn't resist following the URL, and the spammer turned out to be someone I knew from school. Being naturally curious, I asked Google about "link:HisSpamUrl", to see if he was building up the massive backlinks he seemed to be looking for. There were no backlinks at all from the blog in question. I went back to look at a pageview of the blog pages, and there was his backlink embedded without any no-follow tag. I couldn't resist emailing him to say that his spamming was all in vain. He replied that Google was indeed indexing his backlinks and contributing to his site's pagerank, but that Google was "picky" about the links it revealed on a backlink search. He said that there were other secret ways to see the real backlinks, which he couldn't reveal. I am consumed with curiousity to know whether he was telling the truth, or whether he was bluffing. Can you help? Please!

first send him email what he say

And is there any chance of a sensible reply from someone who has actually read my first post?

He was bluffing probably..

Googles link command does not work so dont worry about that,

You can check links using yahoo link checker (forget the proper name, type link command in yahoo and it will automatically take you there)

Those in my SEO circle all seem to be of the opinion that not all links are visible when you check to see how many a particular site has compiled.   I know that on my own site when I checked for inbound links not all of them showed up in the search.  Several links from my own blogs were invisible ... but I know they are there and good links.  Yahoo link checker seems to give you a reasonable estimate, but, it is a minimum count of your total ... there are probably at least 10% more links than you are seeing.

I wish the SE's would tell us these things!

He will probably sell you the "secret" for a small price lol

Well i think he is bluffing.. Does not see any truth in his claims!

hi, you send that guy  email

thanks for provide me information about this topic

The person from your hometown is trying to bluff you indeed.  There are no secrets you can check any websites backlinks to see if what they are building and Google does hide anything from anyone, i.e. you are not going to have thousands of backlinks in GWT and then for some apparent reason when checking the links like you did, then not see them.  Your friend in discussion would be better to be real with himself.