Sometime around the housing market crash (though unrelated, I assume) Google seemed to give up on fighting spam sites and just harshly down-ranked anything that's wasn't an ultra-high-traffic site. A little while later (2010? 2011?) their search got much "smarter" and it became difficult to impossible to trick it into giving you less-popular results using well-crafted searches. A big (and very good!) chunk of the web became way less visible over that span of 2-3 years or so—and my impressive-even-to-other-developers Shaolin Google-Fu was defeated by Google's Tiger Style :-(

You can also see the ugly results of their new ranking system any time you search for a simple answer that deserves maybe two sentences, and are greeted with ten search results all of which are a dozen rambling, content-free paragraphs, with a title closely matching your search and with your answer buried somewhere inside (maybe). That reads as "high value" and "high relevance" so google eats it up, even though it's 100% grade-A garbage content.