IMHO, the problem with Google isn't SEO. It's Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the 'engagement algorithm' Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn't search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I'm trying to find and that's exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it's still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn't include what I searched for.

It's actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn't their most important product. And it's been slow downhill ever since.