Quote Originally Posted by TFTpwnsYou
You're kind of right on this. One thing I never knew is actually it's not the most popular it's who pays the most money to put their site in the top spots.
That is not completely true, traffic is a very big determining factor as where they end up on the search engines. They can pay companies to GET them more traffic, i.e. this: http://www.megawebpromotion.com/ But if they get a lot of traffic for free it still moves up their page ranking. That is what ads on websites do, they pay for those ads to give them more traffic and thus bump them up.