Coming to 3rd place in Saas Project with spam backlinks

[lesseo]

There is a Saas Project that I have been working on SEO for 1 year. One of our competitors has been ranked 3rd in 2 important keywords due to thousands of comment backlinks (all spam) it has received in an average of 18 months, hundreds of irrelevant forum links and promotional articles from hundreds of irrelevant and low-quality blog sites. And for about 1 year.

What do you say to that :)

[goodroi]

There are over 100 different ranking factors (actually over 14000 ranking factors depending on how you want to count them). A website can rank very high even if they do some stupid things like stuffing a meta keyword tag because they did other really smart things like creating a really strong title tag. So don't blindly follow the competition.

Backlinks have become less critical as Google has introduced and expanded other ranking factors. Being less critical does not mean being ignored. The same way that low quality does not mean no quality. If a low quality backlink is worth $0.01 & you have a million of them, well you now have $10,000.00. Maybe all of these backlinks are totally worthless but they 301 redirected a strong domain into their current domain. Many possible explanations.

Plus backlinks can indirectly generate ranking signals. Hundreds of the links might be irrelevant and worthless but maybe ten of the links are relevant and driving great traffic that generates strong usage signals. Doing widescale link drops can grow brand awareness which will drive more people to search Google for that company which can then influence Google autocomplete.

SEO isn't simply. There are many, many, many different ranking factors and these ranking factors can influence each other.

[lesseo]

I understand, thank you.