I have a small cricket spreadsheet site that has been listed on Google
for a while now.  When I was trying to get my site indexed, I asked
some larger cricket sites to link to it, which they did.

Now, when you search for 'cricket spreadsheet' or something similar,
two larger cricket sites that have a link to my site show up on the
first results page (with the link to my site shown in the result
blurb), while my site is on page five or six.

Statcounter shows that I'm getting 95% of my traffic from these link
pages rather than from Google results, presumably because users search
Google
and navigate to my site via the link pages on the first results page.
As all the users are staying on the site for a while, I'm guessing
they were looking specifically for my site rather than trawling the
links pages.

Questions:  If my site was getting all of these hits direct from
Google (rather than the link page middle man) my site would go higher
in the results, right?  Does my site get any credit from Google or
just the link page?  Can I do anything?