Not just the search engines, but the websites themselves as well. Gaming the search engines is now an entire profitable industry, not just people putting links to their friends’ websites at the bottom of their webpage, or making a webring.

It’s just been a race to the bottom. The search engines get worse, as do the websites, and the whole thing is exacerbated by people today being able to churn out entire websites by the hundreds. Anyone trying to do things without playing the game simply ends up buried under layers of rubbish.