I wonder if in the fight against SEOs Google didn't accidentally punish actual experts. SEO organizations will relentlessly hound changes to Google's algorithm in ways that regular users do not.
In the old days it was cost prohibitive to setup a massive network of interconnected fake hosts to boost your rank, but these days with cheap VPSes this is entirely possible and probably even profitable. I'm certainly not the only person who has searched for something and found a ton of differently styled blogs all hosting exactly the same content stolen from some legitimate website and clogging up pages of Google results.
In the old days it was cost prohibitive to setup a massive network of interconnected fake hosts to boost your rank, but these days with cheap VPSes this is entirely possible and probably even profitable. I'm certainly not the only person who has searched for something and found a ton of differently styled blogs all hosting exactly the same content stolen from some legitimate website and clogging up pages of Google results.