[EDIT] For those who weren't around for it, Google used to play cat-n-mouse with spam-site operators. It'd go through cycles where results would slowly get worse, then suddenly a ton better, though never as bad as they are today. Around '08 or '09 they (evidently, I'm just judging from the search engine's behavior starting around then and continuing to this day) seemed to give up and just boosted a relatively small set of sites way up the results, abandoning the rest to the spammers.