I run a website that's been around for about three years in the sports space. I am successfully ranking well for targeted keywords, but searching for the name of my site itself returns very poor results - it shows my site, its FB/Twitter, and then 15 pages of unrelated spam that happen to contain two words that, when combined, form my website's name. After that, my backlinks begin to show up spordically.

As far as I can tell, I simply don't have enough backlinks and the backlinks I do have are ranked worse than the spam. (Site Explorer lists 200 external links to any page on our domain and 20 external links directly to the front page).

To counter this, my strategy is to promote my backlinks so they get a better page rank than the spam. Does that make sense? Am I going in the right direction or should I just focus on getting more backlinks pointing directly to my site?

Thanks in advance and I'd be happy to answer any questions I can (without giving away my site of course).