Psmith0000 - 6:47 pm on Mar 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

Please forgive me if I overstep- I am not a webmaster, only a small company administrator trying to understand the world of SEO, and Google. I have read a lot about how Google works, from Google's site and here on this very informative forum.

But I still don't quite understand some things. Is it true that Google will consider a site more "popular" if there are many links to it, regardless of the "quality" of those links? For instance, many competitive sites have pages of "links" that are wholly unrelated to the search category, yet as a result, their rank would be much higher than ours, which does not participate in reciprocal links? Maybe it is the term "popular" that throws me. So in reality the actual sites may have no more real value to the visitor than our website as far as content goes, but it will be ranked higher because they have many category unrelated links? Is this an accurate description of how Google works?

Thanks in advance for clarifying this for me.