Big Brands, Backlinks and Spam Backlinks

[alco]

Hi.

I have a site I am trying to rank for. It has 15,000 exact searches a month. My site is on position 15, it is 18 months old, has more backlinks then sites in front. About 50% of these links are 'spam' types such as profiles and blog commenting. The content is relevant and perhaps even more so then the sites on the first pages (they are all ecommerce) yet the site is only on the second page. Does Google have a preference for big names even if the backlinks are less?

[dburk]

Hi alco,

First, let me say that search engines do not index or rank "sites". They index and rank individual web pages. So "site" level factors do not play a role. The only thing the search engines consider are the signals of relevance for the individual page. Those signals include content on the individual page as well as the pages that link to and from that page. It also considers trust and link juice as a weighting factor for relevancy signals from inbound links.

Search engines do not rank webpages based on the number of backlinks to a website. They rank web pages on signals of relevancy. You need to learn how search engines use backlink relevance to influence your page's overall relevancy score and exploit that if you wish to outrank your competitors.

You might get there eventually by slinging a ton of spam against the wall to see what sticks. However, your competitors can easily get one good meritorious link that overcomes 3 months of your spam slinging methods.

Work smart, not hard.