Checking backlinks: Look at Marketleap and Hotbot

From a competitive perspective I check Marketleap for backlinks reported by AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Google, MSN, Hotbot, and Yahoo. Its been interesting to see how all the SE's but google will pick up backlinks pretty quickly.

Two points of interest. Recently, both Alltheweb and Altavista are showing roughly the same number of backlinks as yahool. MSN and Hotbot show less. I know in the case of my website, at least, some of what is reported in Yahoo, are not actual backlinks, but pages with our url on them. I wonder if that counts at all for any SE!!

The other interesting fact is that Hotbot, identifies a date with the backlink. I assume its when the page was last spidered. In checking both our backlinks and those of competitors it was interesting to see some pages that were last spidered 2+ years ago. In some cases I believe these are websites that went quiet some time ago. Since we just started working on optimizing about 1 and 1/2 years ago, we had tried to get backlinks from these sources (the ones with old spidered dates on them) and had never heard back.

Also for our own site, (only 15 pages) I was surprized to see that not all the dates for spidering were the same.