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I run a website that's been ranked well for good keywords related to our business for some time. It was founded back in 2007 and has been there a while. Recently a new site has popped up that ranks brilliantly for everything. It's a new site, and the only redeeming factor I can see is that it has an AddThis box showing the Facebook Likes and Google Plus Ones, and they are around 400 Facebook Likes and 80 Google+ (for every page that ranks). Any other pages on their site which doesn't have any Facebook likes or Google Plus Ones, they don't rank. Our site doesn't have any likes or pluses. Is this making the difference? I stress that other than this our sites are very similar, other than the fact we've been around over 5 years.

Our mozTrust number is just 1.06. Looking at the rankings for important keywords for us, the sites around us all have over 4. However on closer inspection, even some with a mozTrust of over 4 don't really have much of a different linking profile than our site. With one competitor, I've looked on OpenSiteExplorer comparing link metrics, and we get tickmarks for everything other than mozTrust (1.06 us, 4.5 them). What could posssibly be causing such a low number, and how important a factor is this in SERPS?

A new site has appeared in our industry, and has taken the number 1 spot that we had for some time (years), in addition to some other great rankings above us for good keywords. The site to my eyes is no better than ours, but what it does have is lots of links from different root domains. However these root domains are spam, as far as I can see. You know the type, nonsensical blog comments, even links in nonsensical content on other sites. You couldn't make any sense out of the text if you tried. I think this is the reason this site is ranked above ours now. His domain and pages have higher mozTrust and mozRank already, despite it being a brand new site. I realise the importance of incoming links, especially from different, good quality individual domains, but my question is, do we join him by getting spammy links everywhere?