Currently, rolling bearings operate in harsh environments, resulting in acquired signals with a low signal-to-noise ratio. In light of this, this paper proposes an improved variational modal decomposition(VMD) combined with refine composite multi-scale fuzzy entropy (RCMFE) and linear support vector machine (LSVM) for fault diagnosis. Firstly, the sailfish optimization (SFO) algorithm is employed to optimize the important parameter combinations in the VMD algorithm, using the envelope entropy as its objective function. The analysis includes both simulated and real measured signals with varying signal-to-noise ratios. The results demonstrate that, compared to traditional manual parameter setting and empirical modal decomposition methods, this approach effectively addresses the parameter setting issue of VMD in the signal decomposition process. Additionally, it successfully eliminates noise to extract the fault characteristic signal hidden within the original signal. Secondly, the RCMFE algorithm is introduced to overcome the problem of commonly used dimensioned and dimensionless indicators being influenced by load and speed when used as characteristic indicators. By analyzing the influence of load and speed on the RCMFE value, the results demonstrate its strong stability as a feature indicator, unaffected by these factors. For the intelligent classification of failure type and damage degree, LSVM is chosen as the classification method. Analysis results indicate that the distribution characteristics of RCMFE values align better with LSVM compared to the common radial basis function support vector machine, resulting in a significant improvement in diagnosis accuracy.