Agreed

Big or small, sites need good, authoritative and relevant links - doesn't matter who you are, especially to those deeper pages.

If they're "already known so well within the sphere that their links usually come naturally" then I know of a lot of big brands that are wasting a lot of big $'s when they apparently don't need to !!! :-)

When a top brand is getting outranked in a highly commodotized business, this could be a worthwhile exercise as even moving from 7 or 8 to 2 or 3 could be huge in term sof conversions for top terms. The reason why it should be a commoditized product is that for more complex purchases people will dig much deeper through most of the full first page of listings.

I think one of the things you're seeing now is that they can provide embeddable content that will automatically deep link to them. Any sized site can do this, too; it's just a big edge when everyone knows who you are and you already have advocates.

Great post, Tamar.

While the smaller companies are most likely link building for authority - large companies have to worry about building for structure.

We have many customers who have hundreds of thousands of links at their home page, but will have zero pointing at their most important category pages. While they will consistently rank well for whatever they 'put' on their homepage - they have many diverse business sections which are competing with keyword-in-the-url domains..

The problem with bigger branded companies is that many of them aren't getting the correct link text in their back links. For instance and maybe a bad example, but they are probably getting a lot of links with the word Nike as the link... but they may not be getting enough links that say Shoes or Sneaker in it.