Hi,
You mean companies doing work on their clients websites and they give them 96,000 backlinks?
You have an example?
If there's a keyword you want to rank well but the #1 ranked website has 96,000 backlinks - first do a quick check using Yahoo Site Explorer:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com just to see what sort of backlinks they have.
But in that extreme case you can search for other keywords to optimize your site for - at least at first start optimizing for other keywords. Remove the risk therefore at first be finding other keywords.
However if those 96,000 backlinks are just links from useless pages half of them - I mean don't let the number impress you much - once your website grows you can outrank them if the backlinks like I said look just good on the surface...
Karl