> Google has also been pushing sites that do on-page SEO right heavily in the SERPs.

I can't echo this loud enough - I made great profit by out-ranking heavily established retail outlets for years with super spammy and terrible sites purely with correct on-page SEO and garbage 'keyword optimized' content.

I, as well, now have to append things to searches in order to get real answers. (Or start with a twitter search, depending on the topic)