It isn't so much about whether "Google cares" or otherwise. There are a lot of sites and a lot of vested interests trying to game their search rankings, and a huge number of keywords that the game is playing out in.

Sometimes low quality sites will have the advantage and sometimes high quality sites will have the advantage. Google is working with a bias to high quality, but they are fighting a broad fight against persistent opponents. Every so often Google does a big algorithm refactor to try and make life hard for these sort of sites.