[Quoting your quote] - A time before aggressive SEO? No, just that Google was able to defeat it with Page Rank (one of their possibly few innovative ideas to the search arena). Mathematically, Page Rank did very well to weed out the SEO'd websites of the time.

Point is, I don't think SEO at the time was any more or less "aggressive", per se. Just different. And clearly, the game has since escalated altogether.