Webzcas:
It’s refreshing to see someone is still positive because I have to say most if not all other affiliates I have spoken to recently are quite disillusioned and frustrated and some decent people are giving up.
What you are saying is only partly true. The party line from google has always been that they will catch up with spam. This round of spam has stuck like nothing I have seen in ten years. Even more frustrating is that you can go three or four pages deep and you will see even more crap coming through. So if G catches up, the next pile of trash rolls in.
You cannot disagree that many, many of the good portals are gone and have been replaced by a ton of garbage. Yes, some have stuck but the vast majority of authority sites circa 2010 are gone. Now if you believe in the Matt Cutts gospel 100% then most of them probably overstepped the line in some way and got hit by unnatural link penalties / panda/ penguin or probably a combination.
I have attended a conference where a google webspam team rep all but admitted that they are losing the spam battle in certain verticals and countries. Not hard to guess which those are.
I have not seen a new PROPER portal enter REAL rankings for a year. There is too much clutter of spam and every possible URL variation from brands that do heavy SEO.
But this is the lay of the land, and we should be prepared to work with it. The game has change but I feel the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
IF you have old portals that have survived all this, you are in a good position because your aging will still carry weight. Good luck to anyone starting new and trying to build that level of embedded value “naturally”.