Marcia - 7:39 pm on Mar 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

>>regardless of the "quality" of those links?

Google says they look at the quality of the page linking:

Google Technology - Page Rank Explained [google.com]

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

That's in explaining PageRank, which is numerical and can be interpreted to mean that the linking page is more "important" because that page itself has higher PR.

Link farms are traditionally groups or pages of links passed around to share and increase link pop for all. Then there's also "domain farms" - what I call Page Rank Ranches - sites set up that may or may not be topically related, but whose primary purpose is to pass the Page Rank around among them.

Higher PR doesn't necessarily mean higher rankings, but it's a good part of marketing sites.

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?

Yep, it's not insurmountable but it sure can and does happen. Some speculate about emergence of topic or context sensitive Page Rank, which wouldn't automatically eliminate rigging the score since those who know how to set it up often do it within topical areas. It's the other things that go along with it that determine whether there's actually quality, but in itself it's technically not breaking any rules.